Hitu Chawla - Workspan
Hitu Chawla - Workspan
7:35PM Nov 13, 2024
Speakers:
Keywords:
channel transformation
value-driven sales
partner alignment
co-selling programs
renewal incentives
technical integrations
partner enablement
market acceleration
financial incentives
partner capacity
joint offerings
strategic alliances
multi-tenant products
partner feedback
ecosystem aces
Chip, welcome. Welcome back everyone to another episode of ecosystem aces. I'm Chip Rogers, Chief partner officer or expand and gosh, I'm so excited he too that this is actually happening now. We tried to do this a couple days ago, and we're having some technical difficulties, but
now we're all set, I think, and excited to have you join you too,
that Thank you, Chris. I'm equally excited. I think it's an equal pleasure. And you know, the pluses and minus of being in a virtual world you deal with what technology gives to you on that particular day, but I'm glad
you're here. Yeah. So hitu, just a quick introduction. Hitu Chawla is global Vice President of Global, the global partner go to market strategy at Splunk and gosh, many years at Microsoft. And you know, through a number of roles at Microsoft, and always in, you know, sort of partnerships and, and working with partners and, and, and you've been at Splunk now for a couple of years, and now with the combination of Cisco, and I'm sure there's a lot of changes that come with that. But hitu, welcome to the podcast and really excited to chat. Maybe. Let's start with with your role and what you and your team are. You know are up to it at point these days.
Well, I'm sure all of our friends listening here will agree that there's never a dull moment for the channel role, right? So embracing that energy, I joined Splunk two years ago to help drive a very aggressive growth strategy through channel transformation. But however, to get to that transformation right, I think it's important you constantly balance and test the efficacy of your strategy against the last mile of execution, because, and it's not only with your partners and your external ecosystem, would also with the within the organization, especially with the sales team, and like many SaaS companies, Splunk is shifting towards outcome based selling or value value driven sales, but to truly bring that approach to life, I think it's critical that all routes to market, starting from marketing, sales and channel, they're all aligned and working from a unified playbook. So to answer your question, what is it that the team is up to all of that background? To say the the daily focus, what the day to day of any of the team members, and including the larger partner organization, is building, executing and constantly refining that playbook and the join plays with which we can go we can execute with our partners, and I, what I feel most excited about is that you're actually making good early successes with the partners. I appreciate it.
That's not easy.
Tell me about it. I think, like I said, anyone who's in the channel role and is leading that transformation knows it is not easy. It's a lot easy in the PowerPoint that you create, but it is just the reverse of when you're trying to land it and execute against it.
Yeah, so how, how do you, how are you doing that? I mean, I think that's, it's, it is really tough to to, but you're but you're right. It's, it's important to get, to get those, you know, to get to get the partner organization, sales, marketing, all aligned on the go to market, what you know, how are you working together? How are you aligning incentives and all that? How, how do you think about it? How does Splunk think about that?
So I think I'm going to answer it in two ways, both from an outside in perspective and then the inside out. So if you begin with the and the reason for that is only when you understand what the partner is looking for and what is in it for the partner to partner with you, can you then establish the right strategy, programs, everything kind of extrapolates from there. And if you at the highest level, I think there are three considerations for most partners when they're choosing the principal. First, it starts with your build with value. You know, just partnering with the principal provides that incremental joint value to their offering, and at what cost as well, right? Second, I think what they look for is from a from a go to market acceleration, because at the end of the day, it's all about monetization. So how is the principle enabling their customer outreach? You know? What is the approach to co selling? How are we? How are. Sellers come. They it matters to them. Yeah. What is the marketplace success? Because that's the new way, just in terms of how the last mile of transaction is happening. What is the joint marketing and sales motions to support their demand generations? How are you enabling a partner to partner Connect? In case, you know, it's irrelevant in the ecosystem that you're operating in. So all of those aspects is what they look at from a go to market standpoint, and how do they get more feet on street for their own solution or product sales as well? Right? So that's your second bucket. And then the last, of course, is, how compelling is the financial incentives and or the investments MDF, BDF, whichever way, which is supporting the top or bottom line which they care about. So how is the principal offering the most compelling set of BDF, MDF rebate funds, or in terms of resource dedication, or in terms of access to technology and or credits for them to build their solutions or join marketing dollars, as the case may be, so, pretty much, if you look at it from a, I'm saying, obviously there is a lot to a, one A, 1b 1c but if you had to bucketize, those would be the three buckets that that A partner would look at. And if you then extrapolate from there to your question on how we and if I talk a lot in bullets, which you would, which you may have observed. So what are the three areas that the team is then working against? The first is building the right capacity, capability and commitment model for the partner, whether have the right numbers, adequate numbers of partner by product by product use case, not just product by geo by partner type. And how do you even decide what is adequate partner capacity? So how do you build that capacity model, which is anchored both into your own growth targets and not just short term, but your long as as part of your long range planning, as well as your partner's growth targets, that that's when you get the right balance of that capacity model capability. Needless to say, the the technical shocks of the partner and how you are working to make sure there's an always on tech enablement that you're investing in, and you're not just assessing your partners by the number of certifications they hold, but looking at their technical portfolio holistically, on the solution offerings that they have, and how deeply are they anchored into Your platform. Or how is it pulling your platform? So how are you validating or assessing the partner solution, strength on, on technical capability as well, and then the commitment, which is, which I briefly mentioned earlier, like, what is in it for the partner to sell you, and are they making money? And what is, who would you? Who would you want to engage and why? To make sure it is still a win, win. You know, both your top line and bottom line are growing. So what kind of investments and incentives are you putting? That's the first one second, I would say, is identifying new revenue streams and or operating models like joint offerings across a cross section of partner types, like between CSP, ISV and SI. Can we have a triage and a common bundled offer that makes it more compelling for the customer to act on, versus kind of just either just taking your product and having the SI deploy it, or just trying to co sell with an ISV. How do you kind of take the best of or the part of the ecosystem, versus a partner type? So that's something that, how do you push the boundaries on that, or get creative around that? Yeah, how do you use the marketplace, which is positively disrupting display the space in B to B. What kind of alliances, strategic alliances are you formulating? And the last, I would say, is just having your basics, right? Your partner program. So we, we've been on the journey of refining our partner program, hearing from the partners on things that have both been working, enhancing, but mostly what's not been working, and they've been very vocal about it, and we putting that into action and constantly taking it back to them and validating, you know, have the course corrected? Is this now addressing the pain that you had, also investing a lot in the back end operations and processes, because that's equally critical. If good amount again, you can have the perfect strategy. But when I spoke about the last mile of execution, if either your teams or the partner teams are spending enormous time on just operational, administrative stuff. Up, then nobody's going and selling. So if you're not investing in the right tools, processes and governance, then the strategy will not land. So those are the three areas to your question on how we've been going about it.
That's really interesting. And I mean, so many areas to dive into there. But, you know, maybe we can talk a little bit about the, you know, you talked about making sure that the incentives are aligned, and that that the partner, that everybody's making money, right, that there's there, so that you, you, you're a if the if your goals and your partner's goals are not aligned, and they're not, you know, they may kind of sort of talk a good game, but not really be, you know, fully invested. How do you how do you strike that balance with with partners?
So there are a number of things that I can actually it's such a broad bucket, but maybe just to make it a little more tangible, let me see if I can take a few examples of things that we've done that I want to go back to one of the key things that I mentioned, which is we've been shifting towards as an organization, value based selling. It's no more about selling the license or the data ingest or, you know, just the product. It's the actual use case, which solves for a certain pig. And that's something pretty much, I would say all SaaS companies are shifting towards it is equally important that your channel understands it and executes against that. A lot of the value selling partners, not the transaction partners, understands that language, understands what it is, because that's how they typically do it. But to get into that balanced rhythm where both are moving in the same direction. It's very there are certain things that we have intentionally been landing and to your point about, how do you make sure that partners are incentivized, or they have a certain reason to go act on that. I'll take examples from a co selling standpoint. And investments come in various forms. It's not just the rebates or the front end discounts, etcetera that you give, right? So for our use case selling, for our use case Alliance sales campaigns, we built a programmatic engine that provides top of the funnel leads qualified leads to our partner who maps to that use case. So that takes, we all know what it takes. You know, like prospecting and building the pipe is, is the biggest heavy lift that one has to do. So that's something that the partners are appreciating a lot, a lot because, and back to the point when I was talking about operating from a single playbook and having that connective tissue between marketing sales partnership. So we have on that, on those specific campaigns. It's all the way from marketing to digital sales, handing that off to partners, partners qualifying, and bringing it back into deal rent, and then the field team acting. We've at least for a few set of campaigns that we've been testing. This has been working really well, and now we kind of taking that more mainstream, out from pilot mode and rolling that out across all theaters. That's the first one. The second I spoke about. The second, the easiest one is, again on pre sales and post sales incentives, so again, outside of rebates and discounts, if the objective and since all of this I'm talking in the context of CO selling, right? So if you have pre sales incentives or or post sale which allow for the partner to land more POCs or assessments to qualify that pipe to share that burden with them, because they having to run those POCs and and its cost, resource cost, yeah, so putting those together is something where we've seen the uptake go up significantly, and then we're seeing the result in the increase in deal reg or in partner qualified pipe. Also very recently we've been we rolled out post sales, which is more from a renewal standpoint, to make sure that there is stickiness. And how are we deploying both adoption and then hence renewals? Right? We launched post sales incentives as well. So that's another bucket that the partners are not just appreciating. We can see that they're acting upon it because the uptake is very. High there are other ways which are non monetary, but again, something which is yields pipe and hence revenue for the partner is we set up partner days. Think of them as like speed dating sessions and joint account planning sessions with field sellers. So that takes away from the field partner friction, and that's something which is again allowing us to create joint pipe. We've invested in bi directional tools, including from you guys, where how it allows to have a single view of that joint pipe that we're creating and how we are executing, versus de looping, duplicating it. And the last one I would example, that I would give to you is also on what we calling the power of three campaigns, the intent really being, how do you activate different partner types on the same motion. So as an example, if it's a new logo acquisition that you're going after, our tele team will qualify. Let's say a threat intelligence lead passes it on to an SI which specializes in that use case. The SI will suggest a complimenting ISV solution, and let's say $1,000 free AWS credit to get the customer started on the POC. So now you have a si ISV and a CSP play that you brought in together against a very targeted sales motion to make sure that it's more compelling for the end customer to act on, versus piecemeal solutions that you might be selling. Then absolutely, yeah, things that we're trying, as I thought, I'll just give you more tangible examples versus concepts.
Yeah, well, that's fascinating, because it's it. You know, so much these days that that's that is really what, what a deal looks like. You got an ISV or multiple ISVs and cloud provider and, you know, a GSI, or some kind of, you know, system integrator that's putting everything together, and so, you know, managing all of those partners to bring the deal together and getting all the the the incentives aligned is not easy.
It's not, it's not, but you have, I think you have to one constantly, keep listening to the partner. I think almost everyone does that, just in terms of making sure you validating that what you're rolling out. But the other thing we're realizing is we, all of us, do listen and and we do act as well, but very often we don't communicate back to the partner, because there are things that you may have addressed fixed, some big, some small, like a very big one, if you change your program, yes, everyone gets to know but the certain nuances which are constantly being a pain for them. You fix them, but you haven't communicated to them. One thing that I'm realizing is that over communicating in such scenarios, especially when when you consistently transforming, is not a bad thing. Always remember that you're not the only principle that the partner is working with. So it is. And I can't remember the number of meetings that have been in, and you share, you know, we've done this, and the partner would go, Oh, I didn't know that, you know. And and then you think, oh my god, we're already spamming and bombarding with between the newsletters and the social and XYZ. And the partner still says, I didn't know that. So making sure that, if you know, as you're refining making changes, keep communicating that as well. Just just a different, slight segue from from what we discussing, but it's important that the partner knows how you're fixing and listening to them,
it's, it's really tough. Because, I mean, I think the, you know, an AES job is really, is, is is very, you know, is hard, right? Because you gotta, you've constantly got new information, new products that are being deployed, your own products, and then to sort of consume and understand your partner partners products as well. It's, it's, it's pretty overwhelming. So like, again, not, not an easy, easy, easy problem to solve. I'm curious. I'd love to dive a little bit in hito. You talked about, you know, some of the incentive programs and sort of pre sales and then post sales. I think it's really interesting that you guys have rolled out, and you said he's gotten great uptake the renewal incentives. Talk a little bit about. Out that, because I think it's, you know, the partners are really, you know, critical for that, you know, delivering the service and then, and then, ultimately, you know, renewing,
yeah, so there are a few things, I think. First is following the basic principles, a t minus principle of renewal is extremely critical. And what I'm saying is nothing new that one doesn't know of but very often, from an execution standpoint, it from the largest to the smallest organization that cadence is not followed. You would talk about a t minus 12 to a renewal. But very often, even if you see a t minus three that's happening in the right manner, you know, you would take that as a win. So what a few things, one is our renewal teams are making sure that that they're not it's not just a direct customer motion. How are you involving the partner in that dialog with the customer? If you are having a direct first, there is a T minus bill of material that's available for the partner that you know. Here are the touch points so that you're doing a constant engagement so you you provide it to them. But our teams are doing that direct follow up with the customers, if they're getting feedback, good or bad, whichever ways. How is the, how is that going back to the partner? That's very critical, right? Yeah, importantly, what's, what's that governance or cadence that you're maintaining, is where I'm going with this, in that you're not just delegating it to the partner and thinking they'll pick up the renewal all the all the other where you trying to manage it end to end, and keeping the partner out of the loop and then just meeting them at the cash register. Either extremes don't work. So how do you make sure that you have a program where there is that constant going along with the partner that's one second from an incentive? Or how are we aiding the partner apart from the content or being connected with the renewal team? Is also like I mentioned, how we have pre sales incentives your post sales incentives are could could take one of two forms. One could just be for successful deployment. The first step is successful deployment before the customer can so how do you make sure that you as an as a principal, are vested in the deployment being successful, and that's where those incentives, you know, you can put certain checks and balances on. We are involving RPS team on having, you know, share, call it a checklist, or call it best practice on what, what are the things, especially for complex deployments that a partner can have on what accounts for good deployment and certain areas that they should be watchful of. So supporting from the programmatically having pH support, that's one piece second is just in terms of actual incentive dollars that you can offer to bring that deployment cost lower is the second thing. And third is just from an adoption standpoint. Again, there are workshops which is post the deployment, let's say prior to the renewal at A T minus between a t minus six and a T minus three. You're doing an assessment workshop of where the customer is on their adoption cycle, and then the workshops that you can land for the actual consumption, slash adoption. And then again, we're giving both the workshop content as well as in in certain cases, how we can give dollar back support to run those workshops as well.
That's interesting. So you're, you're, you're building the, the structure for those activities that with the, you know, with the timeline, and then the materials and all of those you know, like, here's what, here's what, here's what's expected, and here's how to be successful for that, that deployment and renewal process to to continue. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's This is fantastic. You do. Let's talk a little bit about about CO, CO building with partners, and some of that process is that something that you're Are you involved in that? Are you sort of taking input from partners to for for the product teams? How do you align? With the product teams, talk a little bit about that sort of early process,
sure, and so that I understand the question better, when you saying co building, you're referring to technical integrations, like first party integrations, or API connectors, like just, just give me a little more on, yeah, yeah,
it could, it could be sure. It could be API integrations. It could be, you know, with the technology, right? It could be those kinds of, like integration, where do you, where do the products fit together? How do the, how do partners fit as a part of the, you know, the sort of Splunk Road, product roadmap. And it could also be services, sort of surrounding services, where you're actually growing services along with with Splunk products in certain markets or geographies or or industries or use cases.
Sure, I think I'm going to take a few different scenarios, because for each partner type, the context of that handshake with the product teams and engineering will look a little different. So let me start with ISVs as an example. And that's something that in the last 18 ish months, we strengthen our work a lot on that, build with motion, with our ISVs, yeah, which is technical integrations and strategic alliances that we also have. I think it it's very important, because there are certain partners where you may not necessarily go to market with them, but just that technical partnership for the end customer stickiness becomes very important. We have identified, you know, who are the who are the ISVs, with whom, depending on the volume of data, Interplay that may be happening between the two platforms, which is critical for the customer and that end customer experience is critical. We've identified a priority list, and then along between the partner technical organization, my team, and the product engineering team, whether kind of defining the gold standard for TAs or, you know, working hand in glove with the ISV on what that integration should look like, giving them that line of sight on the roadmap for the product, because if you make any update, it does not break that integration that you so how do you have that in sync? Way of moving together on those integrations is something that the team is focused on. There are other scenarios where we're seeing that does it make more sense to have it could be a first party integration into the product itself. Those are fewer and it should obviously establish both a business need and a business value for both sides. So how do you identify which are the partner products which either complement or supplement to enhance the monetization, like I said, and then we identifying some of those. SAP is a great example where we have that kind of integration. So we have partners like that. So in the ISV realm, like I said, it depends, but you want to make sure that, depending on the category of the partner, then the business need and the business value, you then figure out how those build with integrations happen. The MSPs on the other side would be a different they again build their own solution offerings, or their solution architecture based on your product platform, and they care a lot about what your roadmap looks like, what features, functionalities you have or not, which maybe an end customer may not require, but an MSP may require for them to deliver a more seamless experience on your platform. In all Canada, I think we are. We are a little more nascent, and we are making sure we understand the value of MSPs we have. We have a very thriving ecosystem of MSPs, but that two way dialog is something that we are between engineering and MSPs. That's something we are making stronger. Like, as a simple example, most, most MSPs require a multi tenant product, especially if they're serving, you know, a mid market and below it's very it's a critical piece for them. Otherwise, it adds to their job task. Not most products in the market, steam products in the market are not designed multi tenant in terms of product architecture, necessarily. But then what is the workaround? Is there some sort of a API or some sort of integration that you could work with which allows for them to do that, multi instance more seamlessly, have multiple role based accesses more seamlessly, et cetera. So those are the conversations in which we started that our engineering team is now actually for the next release. They're seeking that requirement and what they call, like a PR FAQ that they're putting together to see how, how did they build that in in the next releases? So that's something that the team facilitates. Yeah,
a lot going on.
There's never a done moment when you talk with channeling all the time. I think that this is the most anyone would say my role is the most action oriented, fascinating, etc. But I think with the channel, it's very for you, being that custodian for an external body inside an internal organization where you balancing act between your channel priorities just makes your day a lot more interesting versus if you were just looking at your own organization. So yes,
that's fantastic. He too. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and sharing, sharing so much about what you and the and and your team are doing at Splunk and and we didn't even touch on the whole Cisco, which I'm sure there's a lot going on there as well, and, and, but this has been a fantastic conversation, and so much really great knowledge that you're you're sharing, both from from Splunk, and I'm sure a lot of your history at Microsoft as well. So thank you absolutely.
Thank you so much, Chris for having me. It's always a pleasure. And I was listening in to some of the other podcasts, just the wealth of knowledge that you get from this, I was, I was genuinely amazed. There's so much that you can learn from your peers in the ecosystem. So I appreciate the fact that you taking the time to capture this for the for the larger ecosystem. So thank you. Yeah,
thank you. It's been, it's been a lot of fun and and that was, that was the original idea for the for the podcast, is just sharing what you know, what, what's working, what's not working, how people are thinking, how people think about working with partners. And so thanks again for for for taking the time. You bet.
Thank you,
great. Thank you hitu And and for all of you as well, thank you for for joining another episode of ecosystem aces, and we will see you next time. Thanks everybody. You.
Hitu Chawla - Workspan
7:35PM Nov 13, 2024
Speakers:
Keywords:
channel transformation
value-driven sales
partner alignment
co-selling programs
renewal incentives
technical integrations
partner enablement
market acceleration
financial incentives
partner capacity
joint offerings
strategic alliances
multi-tenant products
partner feedback
ecosystem aces
Chip, welcome. Welcome back everyone to another episode of ecosystem aces. I'm Chip Rogers, Chief partner officer or expand and gosh, I'm so excited he too that this is actually happening now. We tried to do this a couple days ago, and we're having some technical difficulties, but
now we're all set, I think, and excited to have you join you too,
that Thank you, Chris. I'm equally excited. I think it's an equal pleasure. And you know, the pluses and minus of being in a virtual world you deal with what technology gives to you on that particular day, but I'm glad
you're here. Yeah. So hitu, just a quick introduction. Hitu Chawla is global Vice President of Global, the global partner go to market strategy at Splunk and gosh, many years at Microsoft. And you know, through a number of roles at Microsoft, and always in, you know, sort of partnerships and, and working with partners and, and, and you've been at Splunk now for a couple of years, and now with the combination of Cisco, and I'm sure there's a lot of changes that come with that. But hitu, welcome to the podcast and really excited to chat. Maybe. Let's start with with your role and what you and your team are. You know are up to it at point these days.
Well, I'm sure all of our friends listening here will agree that there's never a dull moment for the channel role, right? So embracing that energy, I joined Splunk two years ago to help drive a very aggressive growth strategy through channel transformation. But however, to get to that transformation right, I think it's important you constantly balance and test the efficacy of your strategy against the last mile of execution, because, and it's not only with your partners and your external ecosystem, would also with the within the organization, especially with the sales team, and like many SaaS companies, Splunk is shifting towards outcome based selling or value value driven sales, but to truly bring that approach to life, I think it's critical that all routes to market, starting from marketing, sales and channel, they're all aligned and working from a unified playbook. So to answer your question, what is it that the team is up to all of that background? To say the the daily focus, what the day to day of any of the team members, and including the larger partner organization, is building, executing and constantly refining that playbook and the join plays with which we can go we can execute with our partners, and I, what I feel most excited about is that you're actually making good early successes with the partners. I appreciate it.
That's not easy.
Tell me about it. I think, like I said, anyone who's in the channel role and is leading that transformation knows it is not easy. It's a lot easy in the PowerPoint that you create, but it is just the reverse of when you're trying to land it and execute against it.
Yeah, so how, how do you, how are you doing that? I mean, I think that's, it's, it is really tough to to, but you're but you're right. It's, it's important to get, to get those, you know, to get to get the partner organization, sales, marketing, all aligned on the go to market, what you know, how are you working together? How are you aligning incentives and all that? How, how do you think about it? How does Splunk think about that?
So I think I'm going to answer it in two ways, both from an outside in perspective and then the inside out. So if you begin with the and the reason for that is only when you understand what the partner is looking for and what is in it for the partner to partner with you, can you then establish the right strategy, programs, everything kind of extrapolates from there. And if you at the highest level, I think there are three considerations for most partners when they're choosing the principal. First, it starts with your build with value. You know, just partnering with the principal provides that incremental joint value to their offering, and at what cost as well, right? Second, I think what they look for is from a from a go to market acceleration, because at the end of the day, it's all about monetization. So how is the principle enabling their customer outreach? You know? What is the approach to co selling? How are we? How are. Sellers come. They it matters to them. Yeah. What is the marketplace success? Because that's the new way, just in terms of how the last mile of transaction is happening. What is the joint marketing and sales motions to support their demand generations? How are you enabling a partner to partner Connect? In case, you know, it's irrelevant in the ecosystem that you're operating in. So all of those aspects is what they look at from a go to market standpoint, and how do they get more feet on street for their own solution or product sales as well? Right? So that's your second bucket. And then the last, of course, is, how compelling is the financial incentives and or the investments MDF, BDF, whichever way, which is supporting the top or bottom line which they care about. So how is the principal offering the most compelling set of BDF, MDF rebate funds, or in terms of resource dedication, or in terms of access to technology and or credits for them to build their solutions or join marketing dollars, as the case may be, so, pretty much, if you look at it from a, I'm saying, obviously there is a lot to a, one A, 1b 1c but if you had to bucketize, those would be the three buckets that that A partner would look at. And if you then extrapolate from there to your question on how we and if I talk a lot in bullets, which you would, which you may have observed. So what are the three areas that the team is then working against? The first is building the right capacity, capability and commitment model for the partner, whether have the right numbers, adequate numbers of partner by product by product use case, not just product by geo by partner type. And how do you even decide what is adequate partner capacity? So how do you build that capacity model, which is anchored both into your own growth targets and not just short term, but your long as as part of your long range planning, as well as your partner's growth targets, that that's when you get the right balance of that capacity model capability. Needless to say, the the technical shocks of the partner and how you are working to make sure there's an always on tech enablement that you're investing in, and you're not just assessing your partners by the number of certifications they hold, but looking at their technical portfolio holistically, on the solution offerings that they have, and how deeply are they anchored into Your platform. Or how is it pulling your platform? So how are you validating or assessing the partner solution, strength on, on technical capability as well, and then the commitment, which is, which I briefly mentioned earlier, like, what is in it for the partner to sell you, and are they making money? And what is, who would you? Who would you want to engage and why? To make sure it is still a win, win. You know, both your top line and bottom line are growing. So what kind of investments and incentives are you putting? That's the first one second, I would say, is identifying new revenue streams and or operating models like joint offerings across a cross section of partner types, like between CSP, ISV and SI. Can we have a triage and a common bundled offer that makes it more compelling for the customer to act on, versus kind of just either just taking your product and having the SI deploy it, or just trying to co sell with an ISV. How do you kind of take the best of or the part of the ecosystem, versus a partner type? So that's something that, how do you push the boundaries on that, or get creative around that? Yeah, how do you use the marketplace, which is positively disrupting display the space in B to B. What kind of alliances, strategic alliances are you formulating? And the last, I would say, is just having your basics, right? Your partner program. So we, we've been on the journey of refining our partner program, hearing from the partners on things that have both been working, enhancing, but mostly what's not been working, and they've been very vocal about it, and we putting that into action and constantly taking it back to them and validating, you know, have the course corrected? Is this now addressing the pain that you had, also investing a lot in the back end operations and processes, because that's equally critical. If good amount again, you can have the perfect strategy. But when I spoke about the last mile of execution, if either your teams or the partner teams are spending enormous time on just operational, administrative stuff. Up, then nobody's going and selling. So if you're not investing in the right tools, processes and governance, then the strategy will not land. So those are the three areas to your question on how we've been going about it.
That's really interesting. And I mean, so many areas to dive into there. But, you know, maybe we can talk a little bit about the, you know, you talked about making sure that the incentives are aligned, and that that the partner, that everybody's making money, right, that there's there, so that you, you, you're a if the if your goals and your partner's goals are not aligned, and they're not, you know, they may kind of sort of talk a good game, but not really be, you know, fully invested. How do you how do you strike that balance with with partners?
So there are a number of things that I can actually it's such a broad bucket, but maybe just to make it a little more tangible, let me see if I can take a few examples of things that we've done that I want to go back to one of the key things that I mentioned, which is we've been shifting towards as an organization, value based selling. It's no more about selling the license or the data ingest or, you know, just the product. It's the actual use case, which solves for a certain pig. And that's something pretty much, I would say all SaaS companies are shifting towards it is equally important that your channel understands it and executes against that. A lot of the value selling partners, not the transaction partners, understands that language, understands what it is, because that's how they typically do it. But to get into that balanced rhythm where both are moving in the same direction. It's very there are certain things that we have intentionally been landing and to your point about, how do you make sure that partners are incentivized, or they have a certain reason to go act on that. I'll take examples from a co selling standpoint. And investments come in various forms. It's not just the rebates or the front end discounts, etcetera that you give, right? So for our use case selling, for our use case Alliance sales campaigns, we built a programmatic engine that provides top of the funnel leads qualified leads to our partner who maps to that use case. So that takes, we all know what it takes. You know, like prospecting and building the pipe is, is the biggest heavy lift that one has to do. So that's something that the partners are appreciating a lot, a lot because, and back to the point when I was talking about operating from a single playbook and having that connective tissue between marketing sales partnership. So we have on that, on those specific campaigns. It's all the way from marketing to digital sales, handing that off to partners, partners qualifying, and bringing it back into deal rent, and then the field team acting. We've at least for a few set of campaigns that we've been testing. This has been working really well, and now we kind of taking that more mainstream, out from pilot mode and rolling that out across all theaters. That's the first one. The second I spoke about. The second, the easiest one is, again on pre sales and post sales incentives, so again, outside of rebates and discounts, if the objective and since all of this I'm talking in the context of CO selling, right? So if you have pre sales incentives or or post sale which allow for the partner to land more POCs or assessments to qualify that pipe to share that burden with them, because they having to run those POCs and and its cost, resource cost, yeah, so putting those together is something where we've seen the uptake go up significantly, and then we're seeing the result in the increase in deal reg or in partner qualified pipe. Also very recently we've been we rolled out post sales, which is more from a renewal standpoint, to make sure that there is stickiness. And how are we deploying both adoption and then hence renewals? Right? We launched post sales incentives as well. So that's another bucket that the partners are not just appreciating. We can see that they're acting upon it because the uptake is very. High there are other ways which are non monetary, but again, something which is yields pipe and hence revenue for the partner is we set up partner days. Think of them as like speed dating sessions and joint account planning sessions with field sellers. So that takes away from the field partner friction, and that's something which is again allowing us to create joint pipe. We've invested in bi directional tools, including from you guys, where how it allows to have a single view of that joint pipe that we're creating and how we are executing, versus de looping, duplicating it. And the last one I would example, that I would give to you is also on what we calling the power of three campaigns, the intent really being, how do you activate different partner types on the same motion. So as an example, if it's a new logo acquisition that you're going after, our tele team will qualify. Let's say a threat intelligence lead passes it on to an SI which specializes in that use case. The SI will suggest a complimenting ISV solution, and let's say $1,000 free AWS credit to get the customer started on the POC. So now you have a si ISV and a CSP play that you brought in together against a very targeted sales motion to make sure that it's more compelling for the end customer to act on, versus piecemeal solutions that you might be selling. Then absolutely, yeah, things that we're trying, as I thought, I'll just give you more tangible examples versus concepts.
Yeah, well, that's fascinating, because it's it. You know, so much these days that that's that is really what, what a deal looks like. You got an ISV or multiple ISVs and cloud provider and, you know, a GSI, or some kind of, you know, system integrator that's putting everything together, and so, you know, managing all of those partners to bring the deal together and getting all the the the incentives aligned is not easy.
It's not, it's not, but you have, I think you have to one constantly, keep listening to the partner. I think almost everyone does that, just in terms of making sure you validating that what you're rolling out. But the other thing we're realizing is we, all of us, do listen and and we do act as well, but very often we don't communicate back to the partner, because there are things that you may have addressed fixed, some big, some small, like a very big one, if you change your program, yes, everyone gets to know but the certain nuances which are constantly being a pain for them. You fix them, but you haven't communicated to them. One thing that I'm realizing is that over communicating in such scenarios, especially when when you consistently transforming, is not a bad thing. Always remember that you're not the only principle that the partner is working with. So it is. And I can't remember the number of meetings that have been in, and you share, you know, we've done this, and the partner would go, Oh, I didn't know that, you know. And and then you think, oh my god, we're already spamming and bombarding with between the newsletters and the social and XYZ. And the partner still says, I didn't know that. So making sure that, if you know, as you're refining making changes, keep communicating that as well. Just just a different, slight segue from from what we discussing, but it's important that the partner knows how you're fixing and listening to them,
it's, it's really tough. Because, I mean, I think the, you know, an AES job is really, is, is is very, you know, is hard, right? Because you gotta, you've constantly got new information, new products that are being deployed, your own products, and then to sort of consume and understand your partner partners products as well. It's, it's, it's pretty overwhelming. So like, again, not, not an easy, easy, easy problem to solve. I'm curious. I'd love to dive a little bit in hito. You talked about, you know, some of the incentive programs and sort of pre sales and then post sales. I think it's really interesting that you guys have rolled out, and you said he's gotten great uptake the renewal incentives. Talk a little bit about. Out that, because I think it's, you know, the partners are really, you know, critical for that, you know, delivering the service and then, and then, ultimately, you know, renewing,
yeah, so there are a few things, I think. First is following the basic principles, a t minus principle of renewal is extremely critical. And what I'm saying is nothing new that one doesn't know of but very often, from an execution standpoint, it from the largest to the smallest organization that cadence is not followed. You would talk about a t minus 12 to a renewal. But very often, even if you see a t minus three that's happening in the right manner, you know, you would take that as a win. So what a few things, one is our renewal teams are making sure that that they're not it's not just a direct customer motion. How are you involving the partner in that dialog with the customer? If you are having a direct first, there is a T minus bill of material that's available for the partner that you know. Here are the touch points so that you're doing a constant engagement so you you provide it to them. But our teams are doing that direct follow up with the customers, if they're getting feedback, good or bad, whichever ways. How is the, how is that going back to the partner? That's very critical, right? Yeah, importantly, what's, what's that governance or cadence that you're maintaining, is where I'm going with this, in that you're not just delegating it to the partner and thinking they'll pick up the renewal all the all the other where you trying to manage it end to end, and keeping the partner out of the loop and then just meeting them at the cash register. Either extremes don't work. So how do you make sure that you have a program where there is that constant going along with the partner that's one second from an incentive? Or how are we aiding the partner apart from the content or being connected with the renewal team? Is also like I mentioned, how we have pre sales incentives your post sales incentives are could could take one of two forms. One could just be for successful deployment. The first step is successful deployment before the customer can so how do you make sure that you as an as a principal, are vested in the deployment being successful, and that's where those incentives, you know, you can put certain checks and balances on. We are involving RPS team on having, you know, share, call it a checklist, or call it best practice on what, what are the things, especially for complex deployments that a partner can have on what accounts for good deployment and certain areas that they should be watchful of. So supporting from the programmatically having pH support, that's one piece second is just in terms of actual incentive dollars that you can offer to bring that deployment cost lower is the second thing. And third is just from an adoption standpoint. Again, there are workshops which is post the deployment, let's say prior to the renewal at A T minus between a t minus six and a T minus three. You're doing an assessment workshop of where the customer is on their adoption cycle, and then the workshops that you can land for the actual consumption, slash adoption. And then again, we're giving both the workshop content as well as in in certain cases, how we can give dollar back support to run those workshops as well.
That's interesting. So you're, you're, you're building the, the structure for those activities that with the, you know, with the timeline, and then the materials and all of those you know, like, here's what, here's what, here's what's expected, and here's how to be successful for that, that deployment and renewal process to to continue. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's This is fantastic. You do. Let's talk a little bit about about CO, CO building with partners, and some of that process is that something that you're Are you involved in that? Are you sort of taking input from partners to for for the product teams? How do you align? With the product teams, talk a little bit about that sort of early process,
sure, and so that I understand the question better, when you saying co building, you're referring to technical integrations, like first party integrations, or API connectors, like just, just give me a little more on, yeah, yeah,
it could, it could be sure. It could be API integrations. It could be, you know, with the technology, right? It could be those kinds of, like integration, where do you, where do the products fit together? How do the, how do partners fit as a part of the, you know, the sort of Splunk Road, product roadmap. And it could also be services, sort of surrounding services, where you're actually growing services along with with Splunk products in certain markets or geographies or or industries or use cases.
Sure, I think I'm going to take a few different scenarios, because for each partner type, the context of that handshake with the product teams and engineering will look a little different. So let me start with ISVs as an example. And that's something that in the last 18 ish months, we strengthen our work a lot on that, build with motion, with our ISVs, yeah, which is technical integrations and strategic alliances that we also have. I think it it's very important, because there are certain partners where you may not necessarily go to market with them, but just that technical partnership for the end customer stickiness becomes very important. We have identified, you know, who are the who are the ISVs, with whom, depending on the volume of data, Interplay that may be happening between the two platforms, which is critical for the customer and that end customer experience is critical. We've identified a priority list, and then along between the partner technical organization, my team, and the product engineering team, whether kind of defining the gold standard for TAs or, you know, working hand in glove with the ISV on what that integration should look like, giving them that line of sight on the roadmap for the product, because if you make any update, it does not break that integration that you so how do you have that in sync? Way of moving together on those integrations is something that the team is focused on. There are other scenarios where we're seeing that does it make more sense to have it could be a first party integration into the product itself. Those are fewer and it should obviously establish both a business need and a business value for both sides. So how do you identify which are the partner products which either complement or supplement to enhance the monetization, like I said, and then we identifying some of those. SAP is a great example where we have that kind of integration. So we have partners like that. So in the ISV realm, like I said, it depends, but you want to make sure that, depending on the category of the partner, then the business need and the business value, you then figure out how those build with integrations happen. The MSPs on the other side would be a different they again build their own solution offerings, or their solution architecture based on your product platform, and they care a lot about what your roadmap looks like, what features, functionalities you have or not, which maybe an end customer may not require, but an MSP may require for them to deliver a more seamless experience on your platform. In all Canada, I think we are. We are a little more nascent, and we are making sure we understand the value of MSPs we have. We have a very thriving ecosystem of MSPs, but that two way dialog is something that we are between engineering and MSPs. That's something we are making stronger. Like, as a simple example, most, most MSPs require a multi tenant product, especially if they're serving, you know, a mid market and below it's very it's a critical piece for them. Otherwise, it adds to their job task. Not most products in the market, steam products in the market are not designed multi tenant in terms of product architecture, necessarily. But then what is the workaround? Is there some sort of a API or some sort of integration that you could work with which allows for them to do that, multi instance more seamlessly, have multiple role based accesses more seamlessly, et cetera. So those are the conversations in which we started that our engineering team is now actually for the next release. They're seeking that requirement and what they call, like a PR FAQ that they're putting together to see how, how did they build that in in the next releases? So that's something that the team facilitates. Yeah,
a lot going on.
There's never a done moment when you talk with channeling all the time. I think that this is the most anyone would say my role is the most action oriented, fascinating, etc. But I think with the channel, it's very for you, being that custodian for an external body inside an internal organization where you balancing act between your channel priorities just makes your day a lot more interesting versus if you were just looking at your own organization. So yes,
that's fantastic. He too. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and sharing, sharing so much about what you and the and and your team are doing at Splunk and and we didn't even touch on the whole Cisco, which I'm sure there's a lot going on there as well, and, and, but this has been a fantastic conversation, and so much really great knowledge that you're you're sharing, both from from Splunk, and I'm sure a lot of your history at Microsoft as well. So thank you absolutely.
Thank you so much, Chris for having me. It's always a pleasure. And I was listening in to some of the other podcasts, just the wealth of knowledge that you get from this, I was, I was genuinely amazed. There's so much that you can learn from your peers in the ecosystem. So I appreciate the fact that you taking the time to capture this for the for the larger ecosystem. So thank you. Yeah,
thank you. It's been, it's been a lot of fun and and that was, that was the original idea for the for the podcast, is just sharing what you know, what, what's working, what's not working, how people are thinking, how people think about working with partners. And so thanks again for for for taking the time. You bet.
Thank you,
great. Thank you hitu And and for all of you as well, thank you for for joining another episode of ecosystem aces, and we will see you next time. Thanks everybody. You.
