Full Transcript for Why Partner Programs Fail to Create Revenue

the deal, but the vendor-seller is doing most most of the selling. So we teach people to run sp fifty meters, but what we really need to do is teach you how to run a hundred meters, even if we're in a co-cell environment. So so that's what I mean by, you know, we're we're we're kind of doing things in in the wrong way. And you know, the other thing that I would say is we're we're measuring the wrong things. Like the production unit of the channel for the traditional partnering model is the partners. So we measure partner revenue, we measure, you know Deal registrations at the partner level, like everything is measured at the partner level, but the real execution layer of the partner model isn't the partner, it's the seller and the engineering team below. So why wouldn't we move our metrics and move our production down to sellers? And why wouldn't we measure sellers? Like the real value of your of your partner program isn't how many partners you have, it's how many active sellers you would produce within the partner program. So these are some of the things where I talk about, like, hey, I feel like we're We've been measuring and doing the wrong things because we end up with really highly bloated partner ecosystems that scale expense without scaling performance. And that's the challenge. And we can't live like that today with AI and with profitable efficient growth being the measure of success. So Meir Heimowitz: Hmm. I like the analogy of you're focused only on the first half of the race, but crossing the finish line of actually setting up the system to sell direct to the end client is what you need to actually facilitate the entire process so that the entire process actually leads to new revenue as opposed to measuring the wrong thing of just setting up the partnership. But how does that actually lead to mutual benefit and close revenue for for the partner and for yourself? I I saw that you've been doing this for a long time and that you'd have you you'd you'd grown these partnership ecosystems from the inside like you know turning around the the Verizon channel I saw that you you you it it was it was declining for eight years and then you were able to turn that around. What did you see from the inside working and scaling these systems that that made you understand like the whole entire model is broken and and fundamentally a different approach was necessary. Craig Booth: No. Yeah, I I need to give a little backdrop to that to that comment. So I I when I was over at Juniper Networks, I was there for two two times. I spent six years with Juniper Networks back in the you know mid two thousands, like two thousand six to two thousand eleven or whatever it was. and that team we grew from five million to a hundred and eleven million in five years. And then I ended up leaving, going to a couple of other companies, doing other things, and I got recruited back and they hadn't made their number the point that I had left, I came back and started implementing the things that we were doing the first time around, and we ended up blowing our numbers out. And what so what is that, you know, what's the kind of the secret sauce and you know, to sort of answer your your question, we all get caught up in chasing short term deals and that's the way that the the focus of most companies are we need quarterly revenue and we have to drive quarterly revenue and everything's about this quarter, it doesn't matter about next quarter and what you know what have you. So that's the first thing that you've got to kind of focus on. You've got to figure out how to, you know, find the short-term opportunities, but you've got to plan and build systems that are going to continually produce revenue. So the system that we try to put in place, going back to our previous comment, is it's scaling active sellers. The job of my team isn't to scale the number of partnerships that we have, although that's part of it, but the real job of the partner revenue architect or the Or account manager is to scale active sellers quarter over quarter. And so what is an active active seller? An active seller is a partner sales rep that is executing a joint sales or solution strategy with a defined set of accounts. And so you know we can literally turn a seller into a production unit, but we can measure. The number of account engagements that we have, build an engagement rate. So how many meetings do I need, or how many outreaches do I need to produce a meeting? And then how many of those meetings actually transition to a quoted opportunity? And then what's the average deal size and the close rate? So we can measure all of that and we can build a production unit across the entire ecosystem that says for every active seller that I add, it's thirteen thousand dollars. All right, in six months. And so I can start to run, or it might be, you know, 20 or 50 or 100,000, like whatever it is, but you can start to s to predict revenue by scaling active sellers. So I know there's a lot that I you know just threw out there, but this is you know what what sort of drives the the performance is really getting into the the activities and you know, measuring the things that matter are what's going to produce the revenue in the back end. So a lot of what we do is just way too far removed from actual revenue production. And so what I try and do is go and say, where are we breaking down? What are the issues? you know, with with the team, with the the market, with the client, and then let's build a structured strategy execution framework. And then let's enable to that framework and then let's measure to that framework and then let's AI optimize. So that's the that's typically what I what I come in and do to help deliver better results. So Meir Heimowitz: Maybe it would be help helpful if you gave us like a a real example. Like say a CRO comes to you, their partner revenue is flat, they've got two hundred partners, but they don't know which ones actually

matter. Like what what are the first things that you actually change? And what does it look like as far as like the progression of step by step, maybe something that a CRO who's listening to this can actually think through of like where to start because it can feel overwhelming. Craig Booth: Yeah, absolutely. By the way, that's a really insightful question here. So the first thing that we always do, there's kind of a five phase, you know, planning stage or planning framework that that I I put in place. The first thing you always do is you assess. And so you have to assess the team, you have to assess your solution strength, you have to ass you have to assess the partner ecosystem and their strength. Do you have the right partners? All of those type of things. And you know, I have a s solution strength scores, I have partner impact scores. I'm also looking at the market opportunity for the solution that we're selling, how crowded is the market, you know, do are we a strong solution, a favorable solution, a competitive solution, or a weak solution in that market. All those have different strategies that you've got to put in place. So you build up you build the assessment around understanding your solution, your partners, the market, and your reward structure. Then that leads to strategies. So each one of those assessments is going to have a different strategy associated with it based on the strength. So we're going to start building our strategies, and then that strategy leads to empowerment. How do I take this strategy now and resource this strategy with sales playbooks, with messaging, with incentive structures? So you've got to Gotta build all that out next, and then that leads to enablement. Now, how do I how do I take this over to the partner community and look at the type of partners I have, sell two, sell through, sell with, and how do I customize the strategy for each one of those go-to-market motions? and then how do I enable the team to that? How do I build a coverage model on a set of accounts we want to go and attack and target? All right, and then how do I build an execution framework? at the seller level for the seller to go and execute that I can capture again. So that's essentially the five, six step process that I take all clients through that produces results at the end. And it's all data driven. Yeah. Meir Heimowitz: Yeah, I think most people are kind of caught in the middle. They haven't done enough time really planning and assessing, which nowadays, especially with AI helping with execution, I think it's over eighty percent, maybe ninety percent of the work is really the planning phase, assessment, research. and then also enabling the execution when it comes to Craig Booth: Mm. Meir Heimowitz: Again, like your analogy from before, taking it from the fifth you fifty meters all the way to the end zone of like what actually needs to happen for this whole entire strategy to actually play out. you're you're you're you're launching a

a really interesting product, the the revenue execution operating system. and and and you mentioned this just really briefly about where AI plays in. But I'm really curious because I read your quote of AI being the new kitchen, but without a good recipe, you cook bad food faster. So like where where does AI actually play into go to market and and scaling you know partnership activation in your world? Craig Booth: Yeah, so you had kind of two two questions in there. I'll take both and sort of you know break them out here. So the first one, yeah, we are launching revenue execution operating system, which is a brand new Tool sets, brand new platform. We're we're trying to create a kind of a new category that sits between the CRM, which everybody's familiar with, Salesforce of the world, and the partner relationship management platforms, the PRM. both of those will kind of tell you what you've done. Sales is about, hey, this is all this account information, this is our forecast, this is what we've sold in the past. It's also historical data that's that's helping you make wiser decisions and helping you target. On the front end, the PRM is managing clients to the partner program and communication and training and deal registrations and all that kind of stuff for the partner community. What's been missing is an actual execution operating system. So what what you're really looking for is a system that plans revenue down to the metric that can tell you how many account engagements you need, in what time frames, how many active sellers you need to produce, how many partners you need to produce, how many outreaches, how many inbound. Like you need to to build a strategy, a rep op space strategy, to the metric that you can then build the plan around. Says all right, I understand what the metrics are now. Now it says I need 10 partners or whatever it is, 20 partners, who are those partners? Now we want to go in and figure out who the top partners are that based on an impact score that we should be aligning around. When it said I need 71 active sellers is what I need to produce, who should they be? Well, we should go and figure out based on the coverage model. So So the tool is built around planning and it's and it's planning at all levels. We plan at the theater level, the regional level, the partner revenue architect level, the territory level, and the partner level. Like it's all encompassing as far as breaking out metrics so that even the the direct sales rep where ten percent of that person's quota is going through the channel is gonna be fulfilled to the channel. We want to build the metrics that said we're gonna turn that into twenty, and here's how we're gonna do that. So so this is what what the tool initially does. So we built a the planning. We build a production process in the middle. So every one of those accounts, every direct seller has whatever, a hundred named accounts that are tied to them. We want to have an engagement strategy associated with every one of those accounts. And we want to we want to measure how we're progressing against that engagement, whether that's the marketing partners or direct selling. So the tool aligns all of that. We build playbooks. So this the AI, and this goes back to your to your AI AI is scoring all those plans and saying whether they're reasonable or whether they're not. And it's making recommendations, it's pulling data in from Salesforce, it's pulling data in from our platform from the PRM, and it's going through and saying, Hey, when I when I said we need seventy one active sellers, here's who we recommend based on your your territory. Here are the partners we'll recommend, here are the steps and the activities. So AI is bringing all that together under the analytics. so it A AI is also building the playbooks. So we're we're pulling in the strategies that we we talked about earlier, that that whole sort of assessment. We're taking and we build an assessment of your solution and the partner. All that gets fed into the AI engine. The AI engine is now spitting out really comprehensive playbooks with comprehensive messaging. And the playbooks are not about the product, they're about strategy execution. So it's these are the steps we want to take. This is the market opportunity we've uncovered, the pain point. This is the messaging to attack it based on these roles. So it's really getting into the depth of the psychology of selling and how we're how we're out positioning. So AI kind of builds into that. We capture performance data. That data is then displayed in the RevOps dashboard with trending analysis. AI optimizes all of that data, comes back with recommendations on the trends going up and down and what we should go to do to execute against that. The last thing I'll I'll share is that we we have all this records data from account mappings that we've done. And we have AI that sits over the top and reads all of that data and makes recommendations at the account level that says this account we should go in and run this sales play. We should run an expand play or upsell play. We sold this two years ago, we targeted this two years ago. Here's what we should be doing next to that account. We can pull in intent data, third-party intent data to align back into that as well. So there's a lot that goes into this, but the the point of this platform, just spell it out, because I went through a long process there. It's probably got everybody, you know, overwhelmed at this point. But you want to plan revenue, you want to build a production process, you want to capture performance, you want to execute, then capture performance intelligence, and you want to AI optimize that to come back with additional opportunities. And that's essentially what this platform does. And how we're using AI. Meir Heimowitz: Yeah, you you you you summed it up nicely about kind of like a flywheel effect of planning and execution and feedback and data and using AI to continuously

improve. And it's really clear that what is working for you is a level of detail that takes a lot of years to build of the nuances of these Craig Booth: Yeah. Yeah. Meir Heimowitz: Systems where you think about a lot of different variables. And again, it goes back to what I said before. I think when you're when you're planning very, very clearly and in a lot of detail, that's when you actually can create the end to end solution when you've considered every step of the process, as opposed to just throwing out a prompt and and not getting the result and continuously spinning your wheels. I am curious because I can observe for myself, oftentimes we don't see our own blind spot when we're working with clients or, you know, we think strategically, it's easy to observe the the limiters in others businesses but not always in our own. And so as somebody who has such a detailed mind when it comes to revenue planning and execution, what would you say is your main limiter for for scaling up channel force and and really what what would be the main bottleneck that you think would be worth focusing on for say the next year? Craig Booth: Yeah, by the way, really great questions, Mia. So my like any small company, there's always reach to the market issues. So that's the first limiter that I would say is is our reach to the market. the second is just you know reputation, right? You've got to prove you know and create social proof. This platform is launching in August, and do I have enough social proof behind the the platform right you know those are gonna be the things that we're gonna have to kind of figure out how to work through and then I think the last thing on our end would be SOC2 compliance, some of the compliance things that we've got to go out and get aligned around that platform. I'm really pleased with the quality of the of the platform but like anything you know there's tuning that has to take place. We have to get more real-world data from clients using it to kind of strengthen where it is. So I'm I'm you know I was actually talking to somebody earlier today. I was so I'm really pleased with the functionality of the platform. It works just as we envisioned it to work. So that part I'm really, really pleased with now I want to go into AI and I want to make sure that we're tuning the AI so that the output is creating the outcomes that we're we're we're expecting. And so there's there's little things like that that we've got to do to kinda clean some things up and I'm really gonna be curious to see how people, you know, implement and a and adopt this. I've got one or two test clients right now that we're kind of working through stuff with, but I think there's a huge opportunity for what we're what we're building, whether it's ours or whether there's somebody else's a lot of smart people, a lot of good tech that's out there, so other people start catching on and we'll start adopting different pieces of what we do, but But we've got something unique and

I think it's it's needed in the market and whether we can execute the thought leadership is way to the right and the platform is way up to the right, our ability to execute as a small company is way down to the left, so we're gonna figure out you know if we can we can make this thing without work. So it'll be interesting. Meir Heimowitz: Yeah. And and it goes back to like a lot I I learned this recently about how even the best product companies, the only reason that they actually won was because they had excellent marketing. And sometimes even if you have the best solution but it's in a box on your computer running your your system but nobody else knows about it. You can have the best world class thinking and system and execution, but you need that that word of mouth, the like you said, the reach and and the reputation to really be able to carry that forward and and be able to you know actually grow something big. Craig Booth: Yeah, you're you're you're you're spot on and that's this is this will be the challenge for us. I think we've got good messaging. I think the marketing's coming along really nicely. But here's the bigger issue, which is deals are made in the boardroom. You're gonna have executive talking to executive and you know a more established company like let's say that somebody had to make a choice between you know, buying my wanting to buy my product or buying some other module within Salesforce that does something. Maybe nowhere near as comprehensive or as flexible, but the chances are Salesforce is gonna win that win that module because they know Salesforce, they're a proven entity, they've got relationships, you know, they get a lot more value from those relationships. And I think that those that like those will be the the challenges. that I see that we've got to overcome. But over time as you start to grow and the reputation of the product begins to develop and you know there's a brand associated with it that will it will find its own niche and you know hopefully it'll scale fast enough that we become a a really credible player with you know a significant following and enough for re we can have that seat at the board table as well. So that's the goal. We'll see where it goes, you know? Meir Heimowitz: Yeah, well Craig, thank you for for sharing your perspective. I mean I I I I'm fairly blown away just by the level of detail of your thinking as far as like getting into the details of of go to market research, planning, execution, and then and then continuous improvement. So I I'm sure that listeners can agree that you know They can learn a lot from this conversation. For anybody who does want to connect with you and possibly collaborate, partner with you, where's the best place for them to find you? Craig Booth: Yeah, so I would s first have a website, www. dot channel dash force dot com, the new website with the tool sets coming up in another week, week and a half. But either one, both of those will have on online schedulers so people can schedule meetings with me or somebody on my on my team at any point in time. You can reach out to me via LinkedIn, so I accept almost every you know, outreach recre request and just DM me if you want to set up a meeting and Or see a demo or not even that, just have a conversation, I'm always happy to talk to people. So yeah, thank you. Meir Heimowitz: Amazing. Thank you so much, Craig.