Navigating the New Partner Landscape: Enabling Growth in an Era of Longer Buying Cycles and AI

Jacqui (00:05)
We're talking about that increase in the buying cycle. So more buyers, different age group, a longer buying cycle. It's that whole life cycle management piece. So taking it from the vendor side,

How are you addressing that when it comes to actually coming through to your partners? More content, more things, how are you actually sort of adjusting your marketing with your partners to accommodate that increased buying cycle and buying groups?

Lucy (00:51)
Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Lucy from XM Cyber. I think what's really important here and kind of end where Dean was having a question from you there of why the to and through is really important is I was listening to and I were hearing from Jay this afternoon around how the buying journey now there's like 28 steps or something before they even reach like speaking to somebody.

But there's also like 14 different spheres within the channel ecosystem where people are still communicating, whether that be vendor communities, partner communities, distribution, meetups like we have today. And as one vendor ourselves, how can we get to all of those different touch points without leveraging the channel and that kind of extended sales team and extended business functions? So for me, it's really important that we have that enablement to our partners of what our buying journey looks like and so that they can

Go and spread that news for us. Be an extension of our sales team. Every time I meet a marketing person or a partner, and I'm like, consider me an extension of your team. Because that's exactly what I want them to be for us when we're going to market. One of the key things we do is make kind of joint value propositions with the partners. Give them something specific to them that integrates with their existing tech stack that they're already selling. Make it easy to sell XM Cyber alongside their other tech stacks that they're selling, right?

I think on top of that, the buying journey getting so long and so complex, we're having to look at more in depth in our use cases. We can't just give this generic like, we do exposure management. Like, okay, what does that really mean to each vertical? And what are the business outcomes to it? So we've started restructuring our portal around use cases and kind of giving them streams of how to sell us and making those next steps really obvious as we go down and kind of what.

what the journeys look like and a day in the life of our sales reps as well is a new project that we're trying to bring out to kind of give firsthand examples of what we're going through day to day within XM Cyber. So I think having that content there available for them and step by step guides is so important so that they can then go and take it to market and take and go with them. And obviously we'd be reminisced and not mentioned that the relationships partners have.

with their customers. They're the ones seeing the end users and they're the ones that they're trusting and buying. A'din, what did you say? Something like peers, not ads or something like that. Partners are the peers to our customers that we want to sell to, so we should leverage that.

Jacqui (03:26)
Lovely, thank you. Claire.

Claire (03:29)
Hi everyone, thanks for having me. I'm Claire from Absolute Security. I think proximity to the partner is key for us. So being in front of them as much as we can, having those relationships and ensuring that we are providing clear, concise messaging around how to do business with us, how to articulate who we are and what we do. But the channel is key. So we don't want or expect our partners to be able to get into the intricacies of who we are.

We want to enable them and ensure that they're able to have conversations at a high level to open the door for our team to come in and do the rest and support them. And I totally agree with what Lucy was saying around seeing the partners as an extension of your own team and vice versa. And I think that's critical. The longer the cycle becomes, the more important it is that you have a great relationship with your channel partners.

Jacqui (04:16)
Thank you.

Rohan.

Rohan (04:19)
Thank you. So I'm Rowan Abbey, Extreme Networks. I'm in sales and aidment. So our perspective on this is that our sales cycles were already long. There were six to nine months already, and they are getting longer. And because there's more people involved, the approval processes are different. And what that means is forecasting gets difficult. So we see that growing trend in our business that our forecast is missing on a sales level more regularly. Now to counter that,

we're then having to do more funnel creation. So that creates more demand than our marketing teams to do more funnel creation. We just did a thing called Funnel February, which was a classic old school. Everybody get on the phone, including our partners, and contact customers and just try and find more longer term opportunities. Now that was really successful. Everybody got behind it. But what it means now is we've got a lot more deals in the funnel. And we've got to do different things to nurture those deals.

We don't want our enterprise salespeople engaging on something that isn't going to close for another year. So we're to be doing more blogs, or we just put lot of our training content online for free. So it just means the nature of the things that we do and we do with our partners are changing. And they will need to change to nurture things that are longer in the sales cycle.

Jacqui (05:38)
So nurture is a key part. I'm hearing sales scenarios and vertical use cases and I'm hearing relationships and so forth. One thing I didn't hear there, which I would consider being really key and there's guys in the audience would agree, which is the portal is absent. see you nodding there, which is your portal and PRM, which would then be giving the partner their specific...

content set as being very, very key so that it's, they're not bombarded with an awful lot of information, but they're given a very specific set and sort of shout out to the PRM guys here, that is absolutely key and that's part of that to make sure that they're only seeing the content that's relevant for them and their role. Taking that one next step, so talking about data.

Claire (06:18)
safe.

Jacqui (06:34)
and the data, if you hold on to the mic there, Rohan, and start at your end. So how are you using data, maybe within your PRM, to make sure you're segmenting your partners and dealing with them in the right way, putting them in the right journeys? Talk a bit about your data and how you're using that.

Claire (06:50)
etc.

Rohan (06:53)
Yeah, we have a lot of data. We segment our partner base and try to use that to drive behavior. We have Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne in the same group, I think. So that made me laugh, Josh. And I've made a note of that. So think we need to take a look at that and how we differentiate within groups. So we try to do that all the time, I think, is the answer.

We don't always get it right, but one thing that really matters to us is that we want technical skills really important for us, because we do a lot of enterprise networks in hospitals and airports. If the network doesn't work, then that business doesn't work. So technical accuracy is really important to us. So we look at our partner base based on their technical competency and not just whether they're compliant in the partner program. So we have a lot of technical training requirements, and we drive that hard.

but we also need to make it easy for our partners to stay up to date. So that's a constant balance between being competent and just compliant. So from a data perspective, we're really looking at the skills of individuals, technical people, salespeople, and designers, designers of networks. So we go into a lot of detail on that.

Jacqui (08:10)
As Rohan said, it comes from the enablement side of things. And I know one of your challenges is a lot of your technically enabled partner solution professionals, they're all over a certain age. And so trying to kind of adjust the way you then work with those people. You they've been in cabling and so forth. So now they're moving with you on your journey from a product perspective in introducing AI. how sorry, completely random question. I didn't actually plan this one to Rohan.

How are you doing that? How are you adjusting your messaging to those more traditional people? Because we talk a lot about the sort of the new generation of people and digital buyer, but actually you've got the oldies.

Rohan (08:51)
Yeah, yeah, it's an unfortunate fact that the average age of a network engineer is a middle-aged man. It's unfortunately a middle-aged white man. And a lot of the people who work in our industry have been in it for a long time. They're nearing retirement. So a lot of people are retiring out on the customer side, partner side, and within the vendors. So we just have to do more to bring in the next generation of engineers. That just requires a different message, different

We've got to make the technology sound interesting and make people want to join our industry. So that changes in the way we do things, the way we describe our technology, and to try to different demographic.

Jacqui (09:34)
If you pass back, sorry, back to the data question in segment A, sorry, not the age of your.

Claire (09:35)
Thank

Lucy (09:40)
No,

they're very mixed. No, data for us, I mean exactly what you said, Rohan, but guess partner recruitment isn't a focus for XM Cyber at the moment. So we're using data more to analyze the partners that we have and make sure that we're making data-driven decisions moving forward on quarterly planning, financial year planning. Is this the right partner for us? Do they have the right customers that are matching our RICP list? As our RSDs are...

evolving and their accounts are changing or we're winning deals or we might be seeing trends in certain verticals that actually we manufacturing is best for us and know finance isn't any good for example. We need to make sure that we're looking at our partners and making sure they fit where our business direction is going. So we'll use data in that aspect and then in a more simpler level we have our sales technical marketing roles and that's how we put them into the portal and we definitely still have a project.

ongoing to make sure we can then personalize that journey with the data we have. We have the data, but are we using it to the best way? There's always ways to improve it. definitely the kind of partner journey one is on that. And then I guess my final point would be around the stage that partners are like even down to kind of recruiting, onboarding, like are they in the training section? Have they done their first deal? Are we doing renewals with them? Can we teach them now to upsell other products in our portfolio?

The data of where the partner is on the journey is really important for me because I need to understand what type of information that partner needs, what type of training they need, do we need to push on something, are they ready for an incentive, are they ready for us to start giving them MDF funds, for example. So understanding where the partner is on the journey within XM Cyber's kind of partner program is also somewhere where I'd focus on.

Jacqui (11:30)
Interesting and Claire.

Claire (11:32)
So I think all of the above would be my answer. think we look at the holistic business intelligence. So it's easy to present a bit of a skewed story if you just look at revenue generation, for example. So we're interested in partner behaviour, engagement, the technical skilling that was key, and particularly vertical mapping. So we will look at use case and where we're strong and then where partners play and how that's complementary.

So we'll use distribution business intelligence to help us with partner recruitment, which is a focus. But I think it is important to look at that holistic data rather than just taking one metric and measuring what a good partner looks like, what a good relationship looks like.

Jacqui (12:16)
Okay, now saying from data to AI, which is a very easy transition. Are you using AI in that analysis or how are you using AI in your day to day lives? And is that actually then filtering through to your partners, maybe on your PRM or how?

Claire (12:36)
From our perspective, mean, I don't think anyone in the room would say they're not using AI. For my role, it's more around the evolution of our messaging and how we are responding to AI from our cyber resiliency perspective. So when we meet with our customers or our prospects, they're talking about AI, opportunity, or a threat. And there's arguments for both. So we need to ensure that when we're talking to our partner community, we're providing them with a toolkit to answer those sort of questions.

So from my role, it's more evolution of the messaging as opposed to how I'm using it day to day.

Jacqui (13:12)
Okay.

Lucy (13:14)
Yeah, it's something that's still pretty new within channel marketing for us to be really transparent, but it's definitely something we do need to be using from a scalability perspective. I think for us, like I mentioned earlier, the biggest project we have on the horizon is around the partner portal and how we make sure we're delivering the right content at the right time to the partners and they're not having to trawl through our portal for every use case that we have and work out what the journey is going to be of the prospect that they're speaking to.

That's the next opportunity that I see for us, rather than being able to give anyone a good idea of what we've done yet. It's a work in progress for us.

Jacqui (13:49)
Fair enough.

Rohan (13:51)
Thanks. mean for us it's on two fronts. One is in our product. So competitively for what we sell in our software, AI is a kind of competitive imperative. If we don't have AI in the product, we will fall behind our competitors. So that's a big focus for us. Internally, we've got a couple of AI projects running. We've got a great IT team who got sponsored by our CEO.

about just under a year ago to go and find productivity gains using AI. So that was a bit of a Skunk Works project. the place we found the most benefit was in sales and marketing, the quickest adoption. And the first thing was responding to RFPs. So that's a really repetitive task that salespeople have to do. We do a lot of business with government and there's always a tender process and there's always the same questions.

The other task was could we speed that process up and make it just make to save time. And that was successful. And now we've got about 500 people using an internal only AI tool that has just got all our best information in it. And it's become like a just in time sales and equipment tool now. So that's gone really well. We rolled that out to about 75 of our partners and they're testing it. And we've kind of said to them like, try and break it because

What we've learned is it's not fully accurate. And I think that's our key takeaway from working with these systems so far is that whilst they're very good at solving some problems, people always try to push it further than it was designed. then you start to get an accuracy. So to answer a sales question or a marketing question, it's very good, very accurate. When people start asking it technical questions like what power cord goes with this product.

it either hallucinates or gets the answer wrong. So we've learned that we have to tell people what it can do, what it can't do, and then it's good. So we're still going through a learning journey. I think everybody is. But I think we're finding that now that the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back. Everything has to have an AI angle on it in some form. And we're on this path, and we're going to keep going with it.

Jacqui (16:12)
Okay, I think Claire, you had something to add to that. Meanwhile, Amy, would you grab the other mic? Because I'm just gonna see if anyone has any questions on what we've discussed so far before I carry on.

Claire (16:24)
I'm just going to come back

to something that Dean touched on with the first party data and something that we're leveraging AI for is taking the insights that our technology collects and using AI to deliver back information to our customers as to how they can remediate problems from a cybersecurity perspective, leveraging AI and the data that our solution gathers. So that's where I'm coming from with the messaging evolving constantly as we need to move with that.

Jacqui (16:51)
Okay, so are there any questions so far? We've covered the lifecycle and the bio group, we've covered data and AI. Any questions on that? Yes.

Claire (17:02)
So Rohan, sales enablement is in my mind quite new.

Rohan (17:04)
to

the channel.

Claire (17:09)
When, how do you measure the actual enablement?

Rohan (17:13)
side of it because marketing does their work, sales do their work, that's typically where most partners sell

Claire (17:19)
Sales

people sell, organisations or marketing teams help them with information. But what's narrowed the gap? How do you get enablement when the word enablement used is training?

Rohan (17:33)
Yeah, it's hard. think it's the same in the marketing world where we're always trying to attribute an outcome to some action, like a marketing investment. It's the same with an aidment. We have that same challenge to prove that some training that somebody did led to success. So it's a challenge. That's the first part of the answer. So we measure how many people have done a training course, how many certifications they've got. Those are all indicators.

I think what we're always trying to do is trying to align that activity to a business goal or a sales goal. we take the goals in from the sales leaders. So you're trying to hit this number for this product line, and all of our activities need to line up behind that. And if we hit the number, then we could associate some success to the enablement. But even that's hard, because sometimes there's different pressures within the company to

You know do different things so I don't think we crack the answer yet And it's essential we have to train people we have to we have to have an able and activity aligned marketing But I don't have the holy grail answer yet. I think if anybody's got it here, then please chat to me after Lunchtime I'd love to I'd love to know

Jacqui (18:51)
think something we discussed before as well was the difference between trained tick the box versus confident in actually then as a solution architect recommending and talking through and being.

confident to put your solution, the vendor solution forward. I think there's still a gap there between trained and confident. we've discussed it. And how do you bridge that gap? It's a difficult one. Any other questions on the topics so far?

I'm really enjoying today. It's fantastic. Really, really fantastic.

Claire (19:35)
So my question is when you were talking about

Rohan (19:39)
analysis and AI.

Lucy (19:42)
et cetera.

Jacqui (19:43)
everything the past has been saying.

Claire (19:46)
when you're going through this and.

Jacqui (19:48)
looking

at all the data. Are you feeling that MF support to your partners has gone?

Rohan (19:50)
Finding

Claire (19:53)
DF.

Rohan (19:55)
down

or gone up or been redistributed.

Claire (19:58)
tribute.

Lucy (20:01)
looking

at it data.

Rohan (20:02)
driven

Jacqui (20:03)
doesn't always give.

Rohan (20:05)
the true concept actually has.

Claire (20:05)
So

Jacqui (20:08)
upon

Claire (20:09)
again, what was mentioned was holistic overview.

Lucy (20:13)
So I'm.

Rohan (20:13)
quite interesting.

you've gone through transformation, what happens to the parts, budgets, do they go up or down?

Claire (20:25)
Great question. So the two are definitely linked. then from our perspective, the strategy hasn't changed. It's that we look at the holistic picture when determining MDF allocation. So we actually run a use case program at the present in EMEA, which is different from our colleagues in the US. And we really look at the whole partner profile, so all of the metrics and all of the data.

will inform the decision around MDF allocation. Also, the alignment with marketing, sales, and channel is key to get that proper picture of what your partner is really doing. So there is a channel member of the team here, so I'm going to be careful what I say. But the closer you have your relationships cross-functionally, the better I think you're able to allocate MDF in the right way and deliver true business values which are focused on pipeline and not the wrong metrics.

Jacqui (21:24)
Over to Dean if you would. Just while you take the mic, know that something still like 33 % of MDF goes unused and Jane will back me up in terms of Microsoft Co-op as well. Vast amounts of it go unused. Breaks my heart. And just to add on to what Claire was saying.

Rohan (21:40)
to what I was saying,

and going back to one of my slides, it's about pipeline velocity as well. If you look at pipeline as a whole,

Lucy (21:43)
Thanks.

Jacqui (21:50)
and then partner sourced pipeline and separate that out. Look at the time difference. Analyze that.

Lucy (21:57)
Right, because we found.

Rohan (21:59)
on average.

Jacqui (22:00)
that a partner sourced opportunity, so an opportunity that the partner brought to us, closed 40 % quicker than a

Rohan (22:09)
than

an opportunity generated without a partner in the first place.

Jacqui (22:12)
That

is how you then can take that to the business. What you were asking around earlier, that's a really quick, right? It's not looking at the partner community bring, but look how quickly that closes or quickly it moves through the stages of the funnel. yeah, that's.

Rohan (22:16)
and going back to.

Lucy (22:19)
key metric.

Rohan (22:22)
the pipeline as a whole.

something to leverage on and then that helps divvy up where the spend goes.

Jacqui (22:34)
There you go.

Interesting. Thank you. Any other questions? throw one more at the panel. Gamification. So we've all been sort of obsessed with AI and gamification was like a buzzword a while ago, but it all seems to have faded. Are you using it? You know, is it still in use? you getting your partners excited by some kind of leaderboard or how's it working?

Claire (22:59)
This is my favorite question of the day. So when I joined Upsalute, part of the task was to revamp the way we approaching partner enablement and incentivizing. So I developed a gamification extension of our partner portal where key members of the European team become alter egos, superheroes. We're not taking ourselves too seriously in this. I had a look at the partner portal and felt that the

content was so vast that if I was looking at it as a new partner, I'd feel quite overwhelmed. I wanted to simplify the process of working with absolute security. So build a concept off the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A 10-step program gives partners clear direction across a mirror as to what they do and what order. Takes less than 30 minutes to complete. On completion, they get digital certificate. They can promote that through LinkedIn. That's helping with our brand.

And then we're building a community of absolute legends. So there's a brand piece to it. There's the enablement piece. And then after that, there is a pipeline generation piece. So we're recognizing partners for doing the right behaviors, deal registration, net new opportunity win, proof of concept. So it's that full funnel approach to partner enablement through gamification that we're using.

Jacqui (24:24)
You've just wrapped up everyone's presentation from this morning beautifully, just literally taking the brand piece, all the data pieces, et cetera. Any?

Rohan (24:32)
We've also used gamification just to build on that. think what we found it, because we're a challenger in our market. Cisco's the big dominant player where we sell. So we have to do things differently. gamification works for us there. We have to, again, don't take ourselves seriously because we know the others, our competitors, do. So when we deliver training and sales enablement to structure that as a game, make it competitive,

Our products are pretty dry and so the people selling them actually need to have a little bit of fun during their day. So that all helps. That all helps with engagement, the learning and competition between people really comes.

Jacqui (25:18)
The are still reacting to that and they're all taking part.

Rohan (25:21)
Yeah, I mean, we've had a, because we had to cut some budgets, we haven't done it, we ran it for a couple of years, we haven't run it for about a year. Now people are saying, can you bring that back? So we are bringing it back now we're able to bring some of those tools set back. yeah, so people remember it. They remember you if you do something like that over your other people competing for their attention.

Jacqui (25:45)
Another word that we heard an awful lot about, ecosystem, your partner ecosystem. So my final question is really, do you have influencers and affiliates and non-transacting partners? And if so, how are you dealing with rewarding them?

Lucy (26:04)
So we have a vast array of different partners. I think we could probably name one in each category. We have very large technology partners that we work with that wouldn't resell our technology as massively, but there is a technology integration there. And I call them a strategic partner because they would sell you even if they're not making money out of it, right? Because it just makes sense. Like when an airline offers you insurance, basically saying, we might mess up. So buy this insurance from somebody else.

That's a strategic alliance between them where they're helping each other and one doesn't really make something out of it, right? So we have people like that. And in that case, I have kind of an MDF pot, for want of a better word, that we'll map out at the start of the year and we make co-marketing plans with them. So we're important enough to them that we have someone aligned to us on that side of the business and we'll make plans where we go to market together, whether that be trade shows together, whether that be...

roundtable dinners, webinars, whatever that may be. So I market with them like they are a reseller or an MSP, for example. But yeah, the transaction side of it is a little bit different. We've just signed a partnership with one of the large cloud people of marketplaces that you would have seen on a screen earlier on. So that's another new challenge that's going to come to us as well of how we make that work and how we get marketplace rewards. And we leverage them to support the marketing growth as well. So yeah.

Molta Co.

Jacqui (27:31)
Interesting, so it's still evolving and it's still, I think it's not necessarily a prescriptive process of rewards yet, is it?

Lucy (27:38)
No,

it's definitely not. mean, in my previous role, we did Microsoft kind of admin technology. So Microsoft Marketplace, I lived and breathed in it. And you get your rewards based on how much you do through the marketplace, right? So I think it is good in a sense of, you know, the technology blogs you get or the promotion you get, the executive summaries and quotes that they give you, as long as you know how to leverage them and how to use them and get it out of it. I think that's the biggest issue with it because a lot of people don't even know.

those rewards are there to be used. So it's definitely worth checking out the partner portals, albeit they're not easy to navigate.

Jacqui (28:14)
anyone else on ecosystems?

Claire (28:17)
Similar story here. I think we have a large number of alliance partners that we build better together, complementary messages and do very similar things. So we will collaborate where it makes sense at events. We will invite them to our CISO community events. And we will know that the reality is they're not going to ever become a reseller of our products necessarily, but the partnership and the joined up, better together approach makes sense. So it's more of an inclusion in activities from a strategic perspective.

Rohan (28:50)
Yeah, we're not present in any those big marketplaces at the moment. I think our focus has been on trying to identify who the people are that influence the deal. So we do have consultant programs, consultant programs. So those are the people working. They're typically the people writing the RFPs for some of our customers. So we want to try and influence that. And we've got some multi-vendor relationships as well. So from an ecosystem, that's where we're playing at the moment. think entering some of those marketplaces is something we haven't done yet.

Jacqui (29:19)
you