Best of LinkedIn: Channel Marketing CW 03/ 04

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frenas, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about channel marketing in calendar weeks three and four.

00:00:07: Frenas is a B to B market research partner, helping enterprises translate market, customer and competitive insights into actionable strategies that drive growth and success across their channel and partner ecosystems.

00:00:20: Welcome back to the deep dive.

00:00:22: Let's get into it.

00:00:23: We are doing something a little different today.

00:00:25: Usually we take a wide angle lens, you know, looking at the whole quarter or even the year.

00:00:29: Right.

00:00:30: But digging into the Lincoln activity from just the last two weeks of January, twenty twenty six, the signal to noise ratio was just incredibly high.

00:00:39: There's a specific narrative forming right now that we can't ignore.

00:00:42: It's a

00:00:42: hard pivot, a really hard pivot.

00:00:44: I mean, if you look at the discourse from even six months ago, it was all evangelism.

00:00:49: All of

00:00:49: it.

00:00:49: Everyone was trying to convince their CEO why ecosystems matter or why partners are necessary.

00:00:54: That conversation effectively just, it died in January.

00:00:58: It did.

00:00:59: The why is settled.

00:01:01: Nobody is debating the existence of the channel anymore.

00:01:04: The posts from weeks three and four were so aggressively focused on execution.

00:01:09: Yes.

00:01:10: Messy tactical execution.

00:01:12: It's entirely about the mechanics of how you actually get this done without, you know, letting money on fire.

00:01:18: That is the theme.

00:01:19: operationalizing co-sell motions, fixing these broken attribution models and actually monetizing these massive networks, we are moving from the partner ecosystem as a philosophy.

00:01:30: To the partner ecosystem as a balance sheet item.

00:01:33: Exactly.

00:01:34: So our mission today is to unpack that operational layer.

00:01:37: We're going to trace the money through the cloud marketplaces, look at the data nightmare that is attribution, and then get into the human behavior of the sales reps.

00:01:44: And frankly, we had to start with the biggest disruption in the

00:01:47: room.

00:01:47: Cloud Marketplaces.

00:01:49: It is the center of gravity right now.

00:01:50: For

00:01:50: sure.

00:01:51: We saw a stat from Tori Galloso-May that really puts this in perspective.

00:01:54: She noted that nearly a third of all B to B software revenue is expected to flow through Cloud Marketplaces this year.

00:02:00: A

00:02:00: third?

00:02:01: That's massive.

00:02:03: But the part that caught my eye wasn't just the volume.

00:02:06: It was the deal velocity.

00:02:08: These deals are eighty-one percent bigger.

00:02:10: And they move forty percent faster.

00:02:13: Which sounds like a dream scenario for a CRO, right?

00:02:15: You'd

00:02:16: think so.

00:02:17: Larger deals at close quicker,

00:02:18: but and there is always a but if the metrics are that good you have to ask why is there so much friction?

00:02:25: Getting sales reps to actually use the marketplace,

00:02:27: right?

00:02:28: If it's faster and bigger shouldn't they be flocking to it?

00:02:30: That's the paradox.

00:02:31: and Roman Kyrstenov.

00:02:32: I think had the clearest answer.

00:02:34: He calls it the comp neutrality rule.

00:02:36: It's just brutally simple economics.

00:02:39: It's human nature.

00:02:40: Kristinov's argument is that you can preach strategy all day, but if a sales rep looks at their comp plan and sees they make ten percent on a direct deal, but only say five percent or seven percent on a marketplace deal.

00:02:51: They will kill the marketplace deal.

00:02:52: They

00:02:52: will actively skeer the customer away from it.

00:02:54: So compensation neutrality, meaning the rep takes on the exact same dollar amount, is non-negotiable.

00:03:00: But Roman suggests you actually have to go even further, at least at first.

00:03:03: You do.

00:03:04: Yeah.

00:03:04: To break that initial inertia, he talks about a temporary, composite SPF.

00:03:09: It's SPF being a sales performance incentive fund, a bonus, basically.

00:03:12: Correct.

00:03:13: But the key word there is temporary.

00:03:16: You time box it.

00:03:17: For the next six to twelve months, you say, if you push this deal through the AWS or Azure marketplace, you make more than a direct deal.

00:03:26: You're paying a premium to build the muscle memory.

00:03:28: You

00:03:28: are, but there is a huge risk in how you end that.

00:03:31: You can't just pull the rug out.

00:03:32: Oh,

00:03:32: yeah.

00:03:33: There's that cautionary tale that Roman shared, right?

00:03:36: From Kyle Heisner at Sugar.

00:03:37: A fascinating one.

00:03:39: This company, they implemented it perfectly.

00:03:42: Reps were using the marketplace.

00:03:43: Volume was up.

00:03:44: Then they decided the behavior was set, so they just dropped the incentive cold.

00:03:48: And what happened?

00:03:49: Marketplace deals dropped forty percent in the very next quarter.

00:03:52: Wow.

00:03:53: It just proves that these behaviors are incredibly fragile.

00:03:56: If the path of least resistance isn't the marketplace, the reps revert to what they know.

00:04:01: immediately.

00:04:02: So you have to pay them to use it.

00:04:03: But even if you pay them and the deal goes through, you run into the next massive headache we saw everywhere in the feed.

00:04:09: The attribution nightmare.

00:04:11: This is what keeps partner leaders up at night.

00:04:13: Kyle E posted a detailed breakdown of this.

00:04:16: The scenario is classic.

00:04:17: You have a CFO who looks at the dashboard and says, we invested millions in this cloud marketplace strategy, but I only see two million dollars attributed to it.

00:04:26: Cut the budget.

00:04:26: Meanwhile, the partner leader knows they actually drove like.

00:04:31: But the CRM just isn't showing it.

00:04:33: It's a data tagging failure.

00:04:34: Precisely.

00:04:35: Kyle E used this great example where you might close fifteen deals via marketplace motions, but in Salesforce, the account executive who just wants to close the deal and go home tags the source as direct or other.

00:04:47: Because maybe the lead did come from a cold call, even if the transaction itself happened on the marketplace.

00:04:51: And the CFO doesn't care about the nuance, they care about the report.

00:04:54: So Kyle E proposes a very strict three bucket system to fix this.

00:04:59: Okay, what are the three buckets?

00:05:00: First is hyperscaler sourced.

00:05:03: AWS, Microsoft, Google actually brought you the lead.

00:05:06: Simple enough.

00:05:07: Second is Hyperscaler Influenced.

00:05:09: They helped maybe give an intro, but they didn't find the deal.

00:05:12: And third, and this is the key one, is Marketplace Transacted.

00:05:16: So the deal just closed on the platform, regardless of who found it.

00:05:20: That distinction is vital.

00:05:21: It connects to a brilliant point made by Nabil A. from Lead IQ.

00:05:26: He separated the incentive from the motion.

00:05:29: How so?

00:05:29: He said the marketplace creates the incentive.

00:05:31: It speeds up procurement.

00:05:32: It burns down committed cloud spend.

00:05:35: But the ACE program, for example, creates the motion.

00:05:39: ACE being the AWS customer engagement co-sell portal.

00:05:43: Yes.

00:05:44: Nabil's point is that if the deal isn't in ACE, if it isn't registered, it effectively doesn't exist in the ecosystem economy.

00:05:51: You're not building credit with the hyperscaler for the next deal.

00:05:54: So it's the old mantra.

00:05:56: If it's not in the CRM, it didn't happen, but now it's applied to the partner portal.

00:06:00: Which is a perfect segue, actually.

00:06:02: We've talked about the money and the data, but ultimately, co-selling is two human beings trying to close a deal together.

00:06:08: And based on the feedback from these two weeks, most reps are, well, they're terrible at it.

00:06:13: They really are.

00:06:14: Jonathan Skelding had a bit of a rant about this that resonated.

00:06:17: He said we need to ban the phrase, thanks for the lead.

00:06:20: It sounds so polite, though.

00:06:21: It

00:06:21: does, but it reveals a totally broken mindset.

00:06:25: When you say, thanks for the lead, you are treating the partner like a vending machine.

00:06:31: You put in a token, you get a lead, you walk away.

00:06:33: It's just a transaction.

00:06:34: It kills the trust.

00:06:35: It's not a partnership.

00:06:36: Exactly.

00:06:37: He says you have to treat it like a campaign where the partner is a team member.

00:06:40: You work the lead with them.

00:06:42: But what does that actually look like on a call?

00:06:45: Matt Fairman from HubSpot had some really tactical advice here.

00:06:48: He said the winners just behave differently.

00:06:50: And his top tactic is BLUF bottom line up front.

00:06:54: Right.

00:06:54: Don't lead with product features.

00:06:56: No.

00:06:57: Most reps get on a call and just vomit product specs.

00:07:00: The partner doesn't care.

00:07:01: They care about their client.

00:07:03: So you start with the business outcome.

00:07:05: I can help your client reduce churn by ten percent.

00:07:08: Align on that value first.

00:07:09: Fairman also mentioned something I think gets missed in the rush to close.

00:07:13: Optimizing for adoption, not just go live.

00:07:16: This is the long game.

00:07:17: The deal isn't done when the contract is signed.

00:07:19: Top reps bring the partner back in post-close to help with the rollout.

00:07:23: It protects the MRR.

00:07:25: But even with good behavior, you can run into structural problems.

00:07:29: Yasmina Abu Rumi Santana pointed out a huge failure point.

00:07:33: Alignment.

00:07:34: And she was talking specifically about the AI hype cycle.

00:07:37: A very specific trap.

00:07:39: Everyone wants to sell AI right now.

00:07:41: But Yasmina notes that if you and your partner aren't aligned on technical readiness, You're going to

00:07:46: crash.

00:07:47: You've sold vaporware.

00:07:48: And you've destroyed the partner's reputation with their own client.

00:07:51: That's unrecoverable.

00:07:53: This friction.

00:07:54: Laramie Mergerson had a really insightful take on this.

00:07:57: He says, we try to fix co-selling with coordination, more meetings, more tools.

00:08:02: But Laramie argues it's not a coordination problem, it's a value problem.

00:08:06: Meaning.

00:08:06: Meaning, if working with a partner adds cognitive load to my day as a rep, more forms, more calls, I'm going to stop doing it.

00:08:13: I don't care about the potential upside, the friction is too high.

00:08:15: So axis isn't the starting point.

00:08:17: Value is.

00:08:18: The partner has to make my life easier immediately.

00:08:21: Which brings us to the poor souls whose job it is to reduce all that friction, the partner managers, or as Harold Horgan suggests we call them.

00:08:29: The mini COOs.

00:08:31: I love this title.

00:08:32: Partner managers sounds like relationship management.

00:08:35: Mini COO sounds like you're running a business.

00:08:38: That is the reality of the role.

00:08:40: Harold argues a good partner manager touches everything.

00:08:43: accounting, product, marketing, tech support.

00:08:47: Their real value is absorbing their own company's internal friction.

00:08:51: so the partner doesn't have to.

00:08:53: They're the shock absorbers.

00:08:54: They are.

00:08:55: But there's a maturity curve to this.

00:08:57: Bogdan Sporea broke it down really well.

00:09:00: He says most programs are stuck at level one, which is basically sell-through or order taking.

00:09:05: Part of it just sends an order, you process it.

00:09:06: Right.

00:09:07: The vendor does all the heavy lifting, but that doesn't scale.

00:09:10: You want to get to level three, sell four.

00:09:12: Where the partner is autonomous.

00:09:14: Autonomous selling.

00:09:15: But, and this is Bogdan's key insight, you don't get there by sending them PDFs or making them watch a generic training video.

00:09:21: You

00:09:22: can't train your way to autonomy.

00:09:23: You have to do your way there.

00:09:25: Real enablement is live customer engagement with a vendor backup.

00:09:29: You do the first five deals together.

00:09:31: You let the partner drive, but you're in the passenger seat.

00:09:33: That's how you build a self-formotion.

00:09:35: That requires patience.

00:09:36: And Apishit Gupta made a great point about that.

00:09:38: He said, you can't meeting room your way through physics.

00:09:42: I am going to steal that phrase.

00:09:43: You can have all the QBRs you want, but if your sales team views partners as a pressure point rather than a co-creator, nothing moves faster.

00:09:50: So let's zoom out.

00:09:51: We've covered the tactics, the people, but the ground beneath our feet is shifting economically.

00:09:57: Jay McBain has been tracking this.

00:09:59: The macro shift is from margins to fees.

00:10:02: This is the biggest structural change in the channel.

00:10:04: Okay, explain that for

00:10:05: us.

00:10:06: In the old world, you had a twenty percent resell margin.

00:10:09: I sell your box for a hundred dollars, I keep twenty.

00:10:12: Simple.

00:10:13: Today, with hyperscalers and saws, transaction fees are dropping to three percent or even less.

00:10:19: You

00:10:19: can't build a business on three percent.

00:10:21: You can't, so the profit is in the points system.

00:10:24: Jay explains that vendors are moving to these complex point systems that reward the entire life cycle.

00:10:29: You get points for advisory services, for driving usage, for renewals.

00:10:33: We saw the titans of the industry double down on this just in the last two weeks.

00:10:36: They did.

00:10:37: Oliver Tuzik from Cisco launched the Cisco three sixty partner program and David LaRose at IBM announced enhancements to partner plus.

00:10:45: These are overhauls that align with this exact thesis.

00:10:48: If you aren't driving value post sale, you aren't getting paid.

00:10:51: Okay, we can't finish a deep dive in twenty twenty six without touching on AI.

00:10:56: But I was refreshed by the takes this week.

00:10:58: It wasn't the usual hype.

00:11:00: It was practical.

00:11:01: It was grounded.

00:11:02: Andrew Morris described AI as leverage a mini me assistant.

00:11:06: It scales your playbook, but he emphasized that human rapport is the moat.

00:11:10: AI gives you data, but it can't build trust.

00:11:12: And there was a very specific warning from Dina Moskovitz about using AI for partner discovery.

00:11:17: Yeah, this is a crucial buyer.

00:11:19: beware.

00:11:19: People are using open source GPTs to say, find me top MSPs in Chicago.

00:11:25: The problem is data depth.

00:11:27: A generic LLM doesn't get the difference between an MSP and an ISV.

00:11:32: So you get a list of names, but not a list of partners who could actually do the job.

00:11:36: Exactly.

00:11:37: On the flip side, though, Manage Agrawal shared a great use case.

00:11:41: Long tail renewals.

00:11:42: Call stuff.

00:11:42: The deals that are too small for a human to spend time on.

00:11:46: Use AI agents to handle those routine renewals automatically.

00:11:50: It frees up your expensive human talent to focus on high value strategy.

00:11:54: That's just smart.

00:11:55: So if we synthesize these two weeks, the message is stark.

00:11:59: The why is over.

00:12:00: The how is everything.

00:12:01: It's the industrialization of the channel.

00:12:03: It's no longer the wild west of relationships and golf courses.

00:12:06: It's a disciplined business unit that requires precise attribution and carefully designed incentives.

00:12:12: And for you listening, that means if you are still trying to convince your org why they should care about partners, you are fighting yesterday's war.

00:12:18: The battle now is getting the data right, the comp right and the behavior right.

00:12:22: And the companies that figure out that mini CEO role and crack marketplace attribution, those are the ones who are going to win twenty twenty six.

00:12:29: Before we go, here's a thought to chew on.

00:12:31: We talked a lot about incentives and attribution, very internal metrics.

00:12:36: But what if the ultimate metric for a partnership isn't revenue at all, but speed?

00:12:41: If a partner can shave thirty percent off your sales cycle, is that worth more to your business than the margin you give up?

00:12:47: Just something to think about.

00:12:48: That is a fascinating trade off.

00:12:50: Time is money after all.

00:12:52: If you enjoy this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:12:55: Also, check out our other editions on account-based marketing, field marketing, AI and B to B marketing, MarTech, go-to-market and social selling.

00:13:03: Thanks for listening.

00:13:04: Don't forget to subscribe to the Deep Dive strategic B to B marketing edition.

00:13:08: See you next time.