AI’s $7 Trillion Revolution: Tech and Partners
[Music] morning everybody uh super excited to have uh Jay McBain uh back again on our podcast of course Jay needs no introduction so I won't even try uh but Jay I've been following you on LinkedIn man you've been all over the place uh and looks like you hit your goal to visit 100th country and it happened to be Madagascar so what did you see in madas ask we uh we've been on a lot of travel this year and uh this is um why we work for for other people to get some vacation time it's harder as an entrepreneur like like you toh travel the world but we went on a 10-day European trip to go see Taylor Swift driving through all of Europe and then we just ended up a few weeks ago coming back from Africa seven different countries and going to see all of the animals in their native habitats over a course of three weeks we were on a different plane every day and flying into different places and yeah it's just a wonderful trip for the kids and going to see ecosystems uh in their natural habitat the real ecosystem where the word even comes from awesome so so let's switch to business a little bit I know um we have about half an hour to cover state of the channel and it's a big topic I also know you've been doing some major Keynotes so hopefully our audiences who haven't been able to attend your conferences they'll get a preview of where you know things are going and what what's in your head and what you're seeing so with that um I'll let you kind of get started and kind of walk us through what you see happening at a global level yeah absolutely and as an analyst we always start with numbers but I'll say in 30 years of doing this I've never started with a world GDP chart before the 105 trillion flowing through 193 countries there's several reasons now why is channel partnership ecosystem alliances type of analysts we start at this world number uh one is that in channels 75 % of this number goes indirectly across all 27 Industries we've talked a lot about that on past podcasts but more importantly now as we're talking about generative AI we're starting to talk about not just the next year three years we're starting to talk about the next generation of technology and you might hear Microsoft talking about a $4 trillion Doll Market Tam that they see within AI from their lens uh you might see Sam ultman from open I AI talk about a$7 trillion number in in terms of building out these capabilities so each of these kind of AI conversations now have a material impact on World economics and each of us as consumers each of us as Business Leaders you know see how this is probably going to change we're going to overestimate what we're going to do in two years and underestimate what we're going to do in 10 going back to that Bill Gates quote but this now has an impact on how of us all of us live and and work you know into the Next Generation so from uh before we deep dive into it um just looking at your you know overall slide U how the world is split sort of us and China are the top two players and and we know there's a kind of a partitioning of Global Tech bubbles that are kind of happening around that um um when we think about the AI growth do you see convergence between those two bubbles in any form or shape or do you see they're kind of staying at two separate bubbles yeah I mean this is one of the big changes you know after 40 to 50 years in this industry you know the world is kind of operated and you can just see by color you know from pink to darker pink to um I guess cream color you know the world is split up kind of into a third a third a third North America to Europe to APAC has always kind of been a third a third a third in terms of where the Tam sits but when you talk about generative Ai and now you're talking about the future of cloud the future of technology that line between China and the US is getting thicker and and harder from both governments shutting out each other you know debating on the US side to shut down Tik Tok you know Huawei and and things like that and then on the other side China building their own internet that the tools that they use are are very very different the social networks are different how people communicate and collaborate so there's going to be kind of two internets if you look forward you know by decades and two world powers kind of you know thinking about technology in two different ways and then kind of the rest of the world as as it kind of fits into that so it's a really interesting way to look at the future brilliant so so I know um you know you have talked about before roughly uh average it spend in an organization is between two to 5% of their total you know spend Etc right and the numbers that canalyst and your team has published roughly around five trillion is the kind of the it spend so can you walk through what does that spend look like and what component of that roughly at a high level would be impacted by AI how that's going to change let's say 12 to 24 months Horizon yeah so uh as you said a um businesses and government spend uh pretty close to 4.94 trillion this year on Hardware software and services both in Tech and Telco that makes up about 5% of the world's economy so very similar to a budget within a company is you know how it represents at a GDP level but a quick look at all of the categories and subcategories how it all breaks out the 5 trillion is one really $1 trillion in Hardware $1 trillion in software and $3 trillion in Services split pretty evenly between Telco and Tech it was just last year that tech for the first time ever became larger than Telco services that surprises a lot of people inside of services watching manag Services become a 54 $ 48 billion business one out of every $10 a business and government spend is now on a managed contract so there's surprises inside all of this we're double clicking on the places like cyber security uh even at the edge PCS are going into a super cycle so there's places where Partners can grow in double digits and one of the interesting things to take from this view is 2third of the world is Services the services are growing faster than hardware and software now we're in a world now where a partner is growing faster than the vendors they represent and that's good news for all of us it's good news for the economy and the tens of millions of people that play in this industry this is you know a very strong economic backbone the world econom is growing at 2.9% the tech industry is growing at 6.2% and the smartest partners and the smartest vendors are trying to go and double or triple that tech industry growth to you know in tough times grow their businesses by 15 20 30% is amazing and the tech industry continues to be the bright light in all Industries so if we kind of go back to one of the words you just mentioned um you know the PC sort of super cycle we know covid you know had a huge boost in PC cells and then everybody bought laptops that needed to work from home we are coming out of the back end of that cycle so the PC manufacturers are quite excited and traditionally it Cycles have been linked to greatly sort of PC and server uptakes right but with our move towards Cloud um and maybe convergence with AI do you think this cycle is going to be as big traditionally what PC super cycle has been or is going to be different or the same what's your take on that boost well it's going to be a super cycle by growth into double digits but it's a shift in terms of how Computing happens so I'm showing here that lump in the snake when all of us had to go home with laptops during the Pandemic those machines that we went home with back then are now over three years old so they're reaching into their refresh cycle you know Microsoft just announced end of support for Windows 10 which all those machines shipped with by next October which also creates an Enterprise um uh cycle and then third it's now we've heard from companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google and others of what the infrastructure around AI as co-pilots and other things start to take hold again over the next 10 years the amount of processing the compute the storage the networking that's going to take place at the edge is surprisingly High we're not going to forklift 85% of the world's data back into public clouds and and no one's saying that we are we don't have enough electricity we don't have enough fresh water to go do that and so they really much see um kind of a uh a diagram here of where half of the compute happens on your local PC your local uh smartphone and the local network that surrounds that is going to be a big big player in Ai and we're starting not just on the PC side we're seeing this in smartphones going into a double digit super cycle for the next eight quarters and then we're seeing on the server side like for example last quarter servers grew triple digits talk about an industry that's 40 years old and pretty flat you know kind of during that time just doubled in size in one quarter I will say Nvidia was 8 % of that number and you can see the3 trillion doll valuation that goes along with that but I'll say that this we're watching Storage we're watching networking when this is going to be a pretty wide Network in terms of where the infrastructure sits from The Edge to hybrid to Cloud this is going to be for partners who spend most of their time at the edge a really really good cycle not only for the next couple of years but we're actually forecasting out a pretty good decade to be in technology so what I'm hearing from you that um the word Edge Computing is now becoming Edge AI Computing correct because the processing capabilities and whether they're small models or midsize models they're going to sit on your client and they're going to compute your private data on the client and it will get some overall macr meta level help from the cloud right that's the architecture you're kind of talking about yeah and by the way it's not just growth of devices it's the revenue growth you know to run a co-pilot you know on you know somebody sitting on your shoulder reading all your emails you know listening to all your phone calls doing that processing of models you know right there in your hand it's not going to be on a $500 plastic laptop it's not going to be on a $500 plastic Android phone it's going to be on a $1,400 Android or iOS phone it's going to be on a $1,400 laptop so you know we may shift the average unit price we may double it as people start to say you know I do need to double up and I need the power necessary to have an AI certified machine so for example we're talking about 47% compounded growth rates for these more capable machines that run Advanced uh compute Advanced storage Advanced networking capabilities that will get the best co-pilot type of um experience for the user so not only is your industry growing by devices but if you can shift the the value of each of those devices and maybe even double them uh this is a whole new world for those manufacturers in that space so from a from a life cycle perspective I know you you talked a lot about you know H cycles and adoption traditionally we have seen in Computing that gaming would play a massive impact on high-end Computing architecture outside server P right and then they would come down on the um laptop side or even desktop side separations between GPU or CPU you know how they will come down so how does uh and traditionally I think you have talked about like 2/3 or 70% of the it flow happened through the channel right so keeping aside the consumer segment uh when these kind of the super cycle is coming in where are the opportunities for the partner ecosystem and also maybe in two stack level both at a device level and an application Level because the cloud computing is going to belong to 34 guys right three four major brands so for the rest of us to participate is hard but as application provider it's great as device provider is great as solution provider is great so break us down a little bit that traditionally that we have seen from gaming side how it comes down impact consumer maybe business Computing how does AI Computing evolve and how does a partner ecosystem play into that space yeah I'm glad you brought up you know gaming as an example because you know I sold PCS for 17 years there was a point point in time where the next version of Windows or the next version of Office 365 didn't drive it wasn't enough technology to drive a new cycle guess what drove the cycle in PCS is to be able to play the latest game one of the ironies out of all of this is the technology to play games which was GPU processing to be able to flash graphics on screen and run it you know 60 frames per second and you know in these immersive worlds that got created as you walked in the door this is the Computing cycle if you talk about Intel's challenges right now they missed the mobility shift in 2017 to smartphones they missed the next compute shift which was crypto and crypto wasn't run on standard CPUs it was gpus that allowed people to mine for Bitcoin and and other uh other type of uh cryptocurrency and guess what this next generation of gen also runs on GPU so this small company NVIDIA and small companies like ATI back in the days that made these you know $5 video cards on a standard PC but then a three or $400 GPU on a gaming machine these are the chips that have a two or threee weight list right now to go build towards the future and if you're the company that kind of missed these three shifts in compute right now you're circling the the wagons and trying to figure out a way forward so these are all things that link back to gaming and which triggered kind of these next compute cycles and now as a channel you start to look at the millions of companies tens of millions of people that want to earn one of the seven spots around every customer so McKenzie would say that every midm Market or every Enterprise buyer now has seven Partners they trust we're at the end of the single throat to choke we're at the end of the trusted advisor so if there's seven open seats I need to go help that client client with their role that they play in their organization I need to help them with the industry they're in or sub industry I need to help them with the geography the compliance and regulation that they're in I need to help them with the segment that they're in whether they're SMB whether they're Enterprise government I need to help them with not only the hundreds of categories of hardware and software but the thousands of subcategories like G2 crowd for example has 2262 categories of just SAS and then I need to help help them with all these business models from manag services to subscription to consumption to you know traditional licensing all the 20 different kinds of models so there's a lot of room in that team around the customer to add value and all of these companies and again tens of millions of people are trying to figure out the skills you know their capabilities their capacity to execute given these changes in the economy and given where we're going next so following that train of thoughts um when you think about the various sort of sectors in the it channels right I I know you have a famous bubble charts showing different types of providers how do how where is it today how is it going to play out which circle of sort of solution providers have the largest opportunity of growth tied to the super PC cycle tied to the Aji Computing tied to the cloud apps that are coming into place like what you you talked about G2 if I'm a solution provider right where where are my opportunities at a broad level yeah I mean the number one opportunity for partners is to recognize where you can play and and really there's three things that um you know a customer values and obviously vendors and others the whole economics of partnering either come in the before the getting the customer to the dance it's the 28 moments that the average considered purchase buyer goes through or committ goes through it's at the point of sale whichever way the money changes hands could be indirect 73.2% of the total
could be direct or you know in marketplaces which are growing at 86% compounded at the moment but then a subscription or consumption that's only the first 30 days with the customer now every 30 days forever the upsell the cross sell the enrichment the manage services the implementations the integration all this stuff is the new economics and as a partner at the customer you're going to kind of play in one of these three places you're going to play as a technology integration partner because now the new buyer this year a millennial age buyer is the majority buyer in both quantity and budget thinks technology Integrations are their number one criteria so how you play there and in strategic and business alliances so your average Chief partner officer today at large companies has six vice presidents only one of those vice presidents actually care how money changes hands and and just cares that the money changes hands in your favor everybody else is a non-transactional VP trying to measure Monitor and manage Partners in all of these moments they're trying to find processes and workflows they're trying to find programs and then of course the underlying technology which is the most important piece to make sure that all of those measurable moments become a repeatable reliable data set that you can put money against and it's scalable so we're going through a big transition as well in terms of how you manage a channel from a very linear program that we've come out of for 43 years to kind of this ecosystem view or a network effects where there are you know all kinds of people doing all kinds of things and the more of that you can capture in a reliable way and the way that you can kind of spread out your program dollars to quantify these moments and make sure that partners are earning that's where the that's where the way forward is is partners are now asking what the economics are as opposed to what your front or backend margins are huge shift happening in this industry and the biggest players the most important vendors are starting to shift their language to where these multipliers are and it looks like to the customer you know hundreds upon hundreds of services that in green before the transaction in Gray at the transaction the seven layer stack they're building and then after this repeating every 30 days forever customer for Life the partner has and this is why partners are growing faster than their vendors because the demand for all of this help needed for somebody to come in to do it better best better faster cheaper than than a customer and to do it at scale and drive good outcomes is a bigger opportunity than buying SKS and and buying products to piece them together so this is kind of what the most exciting part of this pivot this change this new buyer this new economics this new platform economy that we're now in and and for anyone in the services game you know this is a huge place to be so if I may just rewind a bit go back to the last slide that we're talking to um let's segment um especially our customer based like two groups right we have Fortune 26 Fortune 100 companies and then we have hundreds um you know mid-market and uh smaller Enterprises um so if I Subs segment into those when you're thinking about a Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 go to market through a partner base let's talk about how would I address sort of influencing landing and expanding this framework that you have then we'll come back and talk about midm Market yeah I mean the first thing top down you know is three years ago now that Microsoft brought out a point system now they came to the conclusion that you know with 400 new partners joining every single day the Microsoft partner Network and looking at those Partners you know 350 of the 400 were non-transactional so when the team started asking like what are these Partners doing how are they making money how are they delivering value to the client how are they delighting the client and if those Partners kept doing what they were doing and were motivated to do it even better um with m Microsoft you know what would be the end result for Microsoft so the decision was made you know for the first time in 43 years since August 12 1981 at Microsoft to go and take what would have been the margin the front and back end margins at the point of sale and spread them out like peanut butter let's quantify and then pay for those 28 moments like if you issue a eBook you know maybe that's worth a nickel like we're not talking millions of dollars here but if somebody reads that ebook and there's a 3X better chance that they're going to buy a Microsoft product maybe it's worth 10 or 15 or 20 cents maybe it's worth a dollar depending on the quality of that moment but if we can start earning points and if we can start to make economics that make sense here's the problem with the model we came from because you know whether it's Microsoft or anyone else you have a partner that does all of the marketing for you in those 28 moments they do all of the engineering they do all of the sales you win a deal in your sleep and all the sudden you've got this customer for life and you're looking at it and it cost you zero sgna that is the Holy Grail of Partnerships that somebody just basically did it all for you and then the next partner comes along in an RFP at the 11th Hour wins the deal because they're $5 less takes the money and they're gone in the night you have to pay those two partners the exact same amount of money and what ends up happening is the first partner if you measured them correctly and you know applied all the sgna savings and you know kind of Quantified it all that partner should have probably made double or triple what you're paying them and the other partner who has gone in the night should have made 3% you know the cost of the transaction like swiping your credit card at a restaurant so all this is doing these Point systems is just democratizing value and it's laying down value in moments and as a partner I would want to go to a vendor and say listen if I'm doing this for you if I'm taking an Outsourcing your marketing your sales your engineering your customer success you know for every dollar I save you I want you to pay me that dollar or at least you know half of it we we'll share in the game um and and I'd want you to know I'd want you to have visibility to all the value that I add you because I'm not the person that collects the money at the last minute and comes in a nickel s and you know it's gone in the night so I I just want to make sure that I'm building out a very specific and granular way to do do this and this is the technology conversation you can't do this on a spreadsheet you just can't first of all you need 10 times the partners that you might have had a couple years ago to better surround the customer and if you start measuring these Partners across maybe hundreds of different moments you know you're going to need technology to be able to do that you're going to need some solid AI yourself to go and drive this new era and uh you know this is why we're so excited because the partners are excited to show vendors how much work they actually do that isn't involving them being a cash register like it's not a Dunkin Donuts or McDonald's cash register here they want to show it and they want to earn the respect they want to earn the enrichment for how they built their business and how they Delight customers and the power they have of influence to move a deal from left to right last thing I'll say is when Microsoft did all that three years ago they've outgrown their competitor AWS for 26 straight quarters since they did it they've become the most valuable company in the world not because Apple slipped up Apple's still Apple but a very boring repeatable recurring business as a platform is more valuable than a company that has to bring out a new product in September and sell a lot of them by Christmas and this is where everyone now is looking up to that and saying how do I rethink platforms economics the new buyer and and how do we attack this opportunity over the next 10 years but what got us here won't get us there so if we stay on this kind of you know influence land and expand and and I I know the framework that you talked about for large Enterprises 1400 even 500 even up to a thousand you know they have a global infrastructure in place they have a lot of budgets in place they have relationships in place whether it's Microsoft or WS or Salesforce or Google Cloud they can possibly adapt to this new sort of economy right can you tell me a little bit if I'm in a mid-market company 250 500 maybe up to even 2500 employees as an IT vendor or it brand going to Market in this reality how do I influence how do I land how do I expand how do I play this framework from a people process program wise well first of all you know there's Network effects um like you said you're going to be living in you know ecosystems there is going to be the case where you're the platform winner where the customer is specifically solving a problem that you're built to solve and they're going to build a seven layer stack around you you might even have a marketplace where they can pull all that together and execute and transact and that would be great but more often than not you're going to be living in another ecosystem and it could be one of the hyperscalers it could be one of the big SAS companies Salesforce service now workday maretto Nets Suite hotspot depending on who the buyer is um but you're going to have to learn you know you know one is you know how to become a platform for that particular buyer that we serve but then how to participate in another ecosystem when I might be layer two layer three up through layer seven of a deal so it means that I have to participate strongly in their Marketplace I have to participate in their communities in the marketing around that platform and the millions of people that are you know adding value in those ecosystems I have to get them when they're in front of the customer to say you know X plus me equals 3 so if you're at AWS or if you're at Google if you're at Salesforce it's this is how I make it better and while you're buying that platform today I make it 20% better so every time you buy them you should buy me too and as the customers looking to build this seven layer stack there's a lot of openings to enrich that deal and obviously to serve that customer and serve their outcomes a lot better but the process you go and do that again you can't do that with simple tools there's a lot of things moving around you don't have to build a a program the size of these trillion dollar companies you don't have to you know spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to go and architect all of that but you definitely want to hook your Caboose to that and make sure that you're playing at least at a level where you can participate in those Network effects and and build a scalable model that you might not be a mid-market company for long if you do it right so what I'm hearing for me if I go back to the word value right uh every time I think about the value I think about value meal you know there's a burger there is a side there is a drink so what I'm hearing from you if I'm a mid-market play If you're not the burger you're if you're not the platform find your alliances find your networks whether it's the main four or five or subsequent marketplaces or what we used to call alliances you go in there you become the french fries you become the onion ring you become the milkshake that's how you attach because in the end the customer is buying a value meal and the partner is delivering that whole meal you need to know where you belong to that Tech stack is that what I'm hearing from you well what it is I mean this is the Coca-Cola and and McDonald's Story I mean there's sometimes you're really thirsty and you go search and you find a Coca-Cola vending machine they're the platform they're the you know they're the value they're they're they're solving your immediate problem but more often than not I'm going to say 80 to 90% of Coca-Cola sales are when you're going to eat and you're going in and that's the the fries and the drink and and things that wrap around it so the the ability to play a platform when you need to and solve an immediate problem when you have to but then also to play in the entire Tam of everything somebody might consume in terms of liquids and that's just the the strategy and this is not an IT strategy this is a channel strategy back to world GDP again and that's what makes this so exciting is that you know the worlds are converging now and everybody should be thinking about you know how Coca-Cola did that 50 years ago so so going back to that Coca-Cola model right in the old days if I'm a Coke wrap and I was only trying to sell to McDonald's and corporate suddenly take that relationship away I'm not selling it on the field my job's gone right but what I'm also hearing from you there's other mom and pop shops or vending machines I should be going after as a rep so my job is not necessarily going away because of these super shifts on AI and Etc is just shifting so if the partners are growing faster than the vendor you know you published a post I saw on LinkedIn and he got millions of Impressions right about layoffs so I also saw an article last week that um there's it lost around 250,000 jobs but it also created 250,000 jobs so are these jobs shifting because of the growth on the solution providers or are the jobs shifting into more smaller nimble like alien PCS of the world that gaming into came into gaming are there other devices other applications where are these people going because they are not sitting idle for sure yeah the good news is we live in a world of permutations and combinations uh in Tech we don't live in a Coca-Cola world you know at Coca-Cola you hope that your executive team go and make the deal with Burger King and Wendy's and Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken I mean you know all the way up and down the map where all food is consumed you would hope there's a Coca-Cola machine inside and there's a a sign out front and it's just a binary thing whether you win or lose that's kind of the more the hardware part of our industry but in software you know we're in a world of longtail so while you're you know building your seven layer stack and you bought the hamburger that you want to buy now you're out there and you can buy any kind of fry or onion ring you can buy Coke or Pepsi or Dr Pepper I mean you have a million choices this is like the marketplace from a toz the amazon.com which is now becoming the it marketplace where you know a customer can go out to the 250,000 isvs and mix and match to their benefit the nice thing is this industry mystery has already has always equaled margin and the level of complexity again permutations and combinations create opportunities in every single deal to go add value because the customer put together seven things in a way that's never been done before or isn't just something you can Google how to go do so that's the that's the world we live in Lucky we're not selling you know soda or pop depending on where you live we're out selling you know millions of things you know to solve millions of problems and drive trillions of dollars you know while we do that in the fastest growing industry in the world I think you just created a framework for me because then an analogy that you used coke with Hardware right um if I use the same analogy so if I'm Coke I'm looking for you know large alliances large placement you know as a primary play because I want to be part of that meal right but I also go after other direct M and pop you know other players through the bottlers you know different distribution Network right now if I'm application then I'm more like n goo with premium content or History Channel with premium content I want to post it on YouTube and make money through ads right because I don't I give it away I hope they buy download my app And subscribe or they go to Netflix or go to prime those are the marketplaces so is that what I'm kind of hearing from you framing you need to know how does the End customer consume and then you got to separate your goto Market motion am I selling Coke or am I selling n Geo content is it Hardware or software then position yourselves and align with the partners is that what I'm kind of hearing you are let's use an example that both of us know really well is Cisco you know Cisco is a company that is going to be like a Coke provider Coca-Cola and um not the other kind of Coke but they're going to be a provider that goes in and competes for the switch and the router and the firewall and you know if they win or lose that it's kind of binary but in the seven layer stack you know Cisco's acquired 235 companies they become the third largest cyber security in the world over 50% of their revenue now is recurring so while they might have won or lost the piece of hardware there's a seven layer stack for the customer the Enterprise customer to get to zero truster sassy and with their recent acquisition of Splunk and other things you know Cisco is going to go and compete for all seven layers and whether you're going to platform with Cisco Splunk or you're going to platform with poo Alto or Microsoft or crowd strike or somebody else it again doesn't matter you're either going to win the platform layer a and some of the seven layers or even if you lose the first layer you have six more layers to compete on so you know if you're that Cisco salesperson and you've lost the binary Hardware decision all the sudden you're in this platform decision you know where the customer is going to set their strategy and build and integrate on top of you can even lose that decision and you're still playing in a $100,000 deal as you're starting to you know add the tools necessary to whatever platform and whatever Hardware they chose so again this is a kind of a odd world where you can lose two times and still win a sixf figure deal if you happen to work at Cisco every company is kind of going this route is becoming this platform economy and and we're not in a binary win- lose world anymore we're in this you know very complex world and while you may not win the million dollar deal you know you still could be competing for the six figure deal you know down the down the stream and partners realize this the vendors are realizing this Distributors realize this and again you know a market that's growing quickly is quickly trying to adjust themselves to how this is going to play out and some of the layoffs that we're seeing that we we talked about weren't that companies are dropping 12 or 15,000 people they're just readjusting how they're going to live in this next decade and they're going to end up hiring more people than they let go it's just they're trying to shift and even Cisco was very clear about the the announcements is that this company's growing and and our people are growing and we're hiring like crazy it's just we got to prepare for these shifts and this economics and these platforms and how we're playing now from where we used to play in the 1990s or in the 2000s so let's let's take that as a basket and I think you clarify the framework so if I'm Coke I am building my portfolio to get the share of the stomach right I I want to sell you chips I want to sell you health drink I want to sell you snack bars I want to sell you every meal that you have through my retail distri distribution Network I have the brand uh relationship that I have I want to get a piece but if I'm Snapple before I get acquired by Coke right I want to figure out what retail outlets what partner Network I go to to sell myself as an attached to a meal before I get the Safeway shell space or some other space right so that that is completely clear so so can I talk to me a little bit about then when these 15 20,000 people that are being asked to to leave a large organization where are their opportunities how do I find the Snapple because they are growing right what I'm hearing from you they're figuring out what meal to be part of right and CH change is the only constant so how would they go to approach if you have some employment advice to colleagues of ours that are in caught between in the middle of these change because CH change is going to accelerate there are going to be lot more larger companies they will adjust their portfolio as you just said adjust their skill sets therefore people will have have to fortunately leave how do they look for the next napple yeah I think you answered part of it right at the beginning is it starts with data you know if I join a company you know the first thing I'm obsessed over is when the CEO tells me how big the Tam the total addressable Market sizes how many billions of dollars are we chasing my first job is to come back you know within 30 60 days with the Sam and Som mapped out which is the available market and obtainable Market if I'm selling cber security it's 91.5% through the channel so I want to come back in 193 countries and show exactly the distribution VAR MSP broader channel of where all the cash registers are so well you know we talked a lot about before during and after the transaction you know the first thing I want to set myself up for is are we aligned do we have a big enough obtainable and available Market to go get what the goals are and the reason they hired me in the first place if not I have to make this s and Sam bigger I have to go get more shelf space for Coke I have to go get more restaurant deals I have to go and get into the bigger Tam number but once we kind of determined that because by the way if you join a SAS company in mtek you might not even have a resale Channel you may not need one ever because less than 10% of mtech and adte is resold so guess what these digital agencies aren't cash registers but now I'm going to look at the kind of Channel I need for example Salesforce became a $35 billion company 99% direct it doesn't slow them down from having 220,000 Partners service now is direct it doesn't stop them from having 250,000 Partners but this is the first job of the channel manager is to understand where and how my product is sold and then work backwards and forwards from that point now I want to ask the second question Tam Sam S is the first one the second question is let's get obsessed about the seven people around each one of my buyers and each one of my prospects again we're not talking Coke here it's not a commodity product we're all in considered purchases so who's surrounding Who's d driving the Consulting the content the design and architecture like who's literally driving the show at each of my customers and when I expand the seven for each customer and each Prospect out to my bigger Tam I might be dealing if by the way in cyber security I'm dealing with pretty close to a million companies today who are tagged cyber security on LinkedIn or they tagged it on their website as something they think they do so that's a really big network of people not resellers but network of people that might influence a buyer on how they think about cyber security so in this world of surround I need at least one of the seven people to know who I am and at least say nice things about me to introduce me into the sales marketing cycle today but if I could have two three or four of them I'm going to do what Microsoft did and and and completely Chang the world so I got to start at one and figure out all the things they read where they go the people they follow I need to surround them it's easier than you think one of the funny things that comes out of all this it's the law of a few if you want to get to manage service providers 335,000 of them the 10 million people that work there and everything they read every place they go and there's only a thousand watering holes and there's only about a 100 superc connectors in that it's such a tight Market some companies run it with one person managing it and the same thing for gsis the same thing for isvs the same thing for digital agencies or accountancy any of the 20 partner types you'd be shocked that the entire network of influence comes down to hundreds of things that you're just not executing on today so my second job as a channel manager is to become a marketing manager and just make sure that we're visible every day we're on those podcasts we're in those events we're in the associations we're in those peer groups we're everywhere surrounding those Partners so they can get that 30- second elevator pitch they can become you know smart enough to be dangerous and hopefully over time they might become part of my program in any which way that I can support them to say nice things about us at scale and really that's where I'm starting my job if I'm not you know 306 90 days in prettyy comfortable with those two questions that's going to lead to what kind of program I need to build obviously the technology that's going to put it all together all the operational stuff the workflows but everything else flows from those two questions and I'm going to want to drive my company into that platform conversation which is the third and final part we're we're either going to win the customer and they're going to build around us or we're going to lose the platform which is totally fine and we're going to go and compete on the other six layers but I want to be in every client at one level or not um to go and enrich and continue to show my value all right so let's uh try to kind of wrap this up I want to leave with uh this massive change that you're talking about everybody's reading you and others in LinkedIn I want to talk a little bit about Jay um the transition that people and talent pool will go through right so if I kind of see the journey you explained how you move from one role to another how you look for ecosystems let's say there are super networkers in I see in my customer base on our Prospect base that are out there in networking events in talking at podcast if I keep that group aside let's say I'm part of this large brand and suddenly I get caught up in this transition of layoffs right so what I'm hearing from you is that sure go take your skills you can apply to another big brand of the same size but the opportunities are also in the smaller midsize lower and you know lower end of the Enterprise sizewise that I can go take my skills because they're trying to go into go to market you know influence land and expand they're trying to think about how to be the fries or the Coke or the milkshake into someone else's stack right so if I am me myself as a channel marketing manager director uh partner Ops person someone in this pool of talent that suddenly caught between this change I have to look for my next employment opportunity uh how would I start would I start with crunch base look at top 100 companies or 250 companies and 100 to a thousand employees space got funded like what is my journey how do I reach out how do I get my next job yeah I mean whether you're in a layoff whether you're currently working I would be working a lot on your personal brand right now for all the people that got typ cast at Channel Chiefs you know transactional Channel Chiefs um are having a struggle you know the people that might have been on those big magazine lists you know 10 years ago they're struggling as they're getting older to find the next job because all the big jobs now the chief partner officers didn't go to channel Chiefs the transactional because they were worried that they would take too much of that point of sale up to the boardroom where people Now understand that you know I need those six vice presidents you know before the sale at the sale and then every 30 days forever I need the tech alliances to be built in front of this new buyer I need the Strategic and business alliances I need all six of these things so if you're competing for one of those big jobs they're million-dollar jobs at the big companies you know this is where your resume this is where your personal brand has to be and even if your job is currently a transactional channel Chief I'd want to be on podcasts I'd want to be out speaking at events I'd want to make sure that my LinkedIn shows me as one of these you know broader partnership folks that understand all of the alliances all of the different kinds of you know non-transactional Partnerships that surround my customer and if I'm friendly with all seven types of Partners and seven partners that surround my customer um you know that's what every company wants to hire for so that's first and foremost whether you're in the market whether you're currently employed I want to be changing my brand right now and making sure that a Google search or if I ask uh chat GPT about me that it comes back that it seems to be forward facing um you know instead of reverse the next question is you know whatever company you join um you're going to be slotted into one of these places but if it's a smaller company you're going to be doing all six roles yourself you could be the only channel manager in a SAS company for example that's growing quickly hopefully you ask for good equity and and good options when when the big IPO hits but if you're that first hire you know you're going to be your own sex Vice residents and and doing the three things that we just talked about in terms of the The Tam Sam and Som data work doing the you know the platform work and then obviously doing the you know surround work um you're you're going to be your own employee and you're going to be working long days and long nights but you're also going to want to make sure that's visible to the world because these companies as we know in the last year you know there's a 30% attrition rate because it's not about you at that point it's about the board saying no we're not spending any more money uh you know anybody that's U not building software or closing deals today is going to be laid off so I'd want to be making sure that you're going to go through new jobs sometimes every two years for a 30-year career I just want to be making sure that I'm forward facing in terms of the things I'm doing and executing and also the way that I portray myself kind of out in the public and to the other super connectors that might be asked you know about me or asked to recommend me I I'd want to make sure that they're not pointing back to the great stuff I did in 1987 incredible so with that uh great advice for the people that are looking for a change in the middle of this incredible change that's happening Jay thank you for your time I'm going to have a follow up with you in a couple of months again we'll talk about tech major Tech shifts in this place but thank you for your advice for your counsel and sharing your thoughts and insights with our audience absolutely [Music]
2024-11-04 13:43
