Best of LinkedIn: Channel Marketing CW 07/ 08

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

00:00:08: Frenus as 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 & Partner ecosystems.

00:00:20: Welcome to The Deep Dive!

00:00:21: We are looking specifically at channel marketing insights from LinkedIn during calendar weeks seven and eight.

00:00:28: And I have to say, going through the stack of sources for this week... The tone has really shifted.

00:00:34: It really has, I mean usually when we look at channel marketing content there's a lot of you know fluff.

00:00:38: A lot to talk about synergy and better together in high-level relationship building.

00:00:43: but this week it felt like everyone was finally looking under the hood of the car and realizing that engine is installed backwards.

00:00:50: That is a great way to put it.

00:00:52: The overarching theme here isn't how do we make friends anymore?

00:00:54: Its' really.

00:00:55: How Do We Build a Machine?

00:00:56: Yeah!

00:00:57: We are seeing very clear move from what i'd call opportunistic revenue

00:01:02: But getting a lucky referral every now and then.

00:01:05: Exactly, moving from that to truly engineered approach

00:01:08: Right!

00:01:09: And to engineer something you need blueprints.

00:01:11: So our mission for you on this deep dive is hand those blueprints.

00:01:15: We're going look at the structural collision between RevOps & PartnerOps.

00:01:19: How actually speak language of big hyperscaler like Microsoft?

00:01:23: Finally where AI fits into plumbing.

00:01:27: Let's start with that collision.

00:01:28: The relationship between RevOps, meaning revenue operations and partner

00:01:32: ops?

00:01:33: Usually these two sit in completely different buildings.

00:01:36: metaphorically speaking I mean revops is over there.

00:01:38: guarding the CRM right

00:01:39: says force for a sub spot.

00:01:40: yeah

00:01:40: exactly managing the direct sales teams forecast And Partner Ops Is Over In A Corner Somewhere.

00:01:47: Managing The PRM The Partner Relationship Management System

00:01:51: And that separation is exactly what Kyle E. flagged as the root cause of The Revenue Gap.

00:01:56: He had this really sharp insight That neither those teams actually owns space between them.

00:02:01: It's a total no-man's land

00:02:02: It IS!

00:02:04: Kyle points out something like, forty percent revenue in BDB tech touches both motions Wow Yeah you have partner involved and direct rep involved.

00:02:12: But because the text acts are completely separate You end up with what he calls CFO problem

00:02:17: Which essentially I can't see it so i don't believe.

00:02:21: Spot on.

00:02:21: The CFO just sees chaos, the board sees risk.

00:02:25: I mean if you have to manually mash up two spreadsheets Just to prove a partner influenced a deal You've already lost the argument.

00:02:32: It looks like guesswork

00:02:34: Exactly!

00:02:34: it Looks Like your making it up.

00:02:36: So what is actual fix here?

00:02:38: Because ya know...just telling two departments to merge Is alot easier said than done.

00:02:44: Kyle argues that Fix actually has to be architectural before its organizational.

00:02:48: You need a single source of truth,

00:02:50: meaning API-first integrations.

00:02:51: Exactly you cannot have partner ops running a system that doesn't talk to the CRM in real time if The account data isn't syncing instantly.

00:03:00: your building your whole partner program on sand.

00:03:03: This connects perfectly to something Brendan O'Connor brought up.

00:03:06: He took it a step further and said that when partnerships fail we almost always blame the partner.

00:03:10: We say oh they just didn't sell enough.

00:03:12: but Brendan argues They fail because the internal system what he calls the embedded GTM just wasn't built to support them.

00:03:21: That term, Embedded GTM is crucial!

00:03:25: It means that partner motion is baked right into the standard operating procedure of a company... it's not just bolted on side as an afterthought.

00:03:32: Right

00:03:33: because if direct sales rep has open different browser tab just to log a partner interaction.

00:03:38: They just won't do it, they

00:03:39: absolutely won't and that leads to friction.

00:03:42: Javier Bastante added a layer to this.

00:03:44: I found really interesting.

00:03:45: regarding definitions he says the failure often comes down to complete lack of shared language between sales and alliances.

00:03:52: oh

00:03:52: this happens all the time.

00:03:53: an alliance's manager runs into meeting all excited.

00:03:56: as great news.

00:03:57: i have strategic partners and

00:03:58: the sales VP rolls their eyes Great.

00:04:01: Let me know when the check clears

00:04:02: because their definitions of success are totally different,

00:04:05: right?

00:04:06: Javier's point is that you have to define the term proven motion explicitly.

00:04:11: if we sit down and agree Does proven mean a warm intro

00:04:16: or does it mean The partner Is actually doing the demo

00:04:18: Or does It means they're holding the paper and closing the deal?

00:04:21: once You Actually Agree on the definition scaling Just becomes A math problem.

00:04:25: but If You don't Agree its A political Problem

00:04:27: And Nobody Wants more Political problems.

00:04:29: Absolutely not Okay, so we fixed the internal plumbing.

00:04:32: We get RevOps and partner ops talking now?

00:04:34: We have to look outward specifically at the eight hundred pound gorillas in the room The hyperscalars Microsoft an AWS.

00:04:43: This was a massive topic in weeks seven and eight And honestly for a lot of companies listening this is where that Opportunistic versus engineered distinction becomes the most painful

00:04:54: because everyone wants to ride that hyper scalar wave.

00:04:57: but As Marina Tunik pointed out regarding the Microsoft ecosystem, most companies are just doing it wrong.

00:05:04: They think joining the ecosystem means filling a form on marketplace and waiting for phone to ring...

00:05:09: Which is the listing strategy?

00:05:10: And it doesn't work!

00:05:11: Marina's analysis was that partners who actually get referrals do three things differently but the absolute biggest one is specialization

00:05:21: Because saying we do Azure is not a specialization.

00:05:24: No, it's just noise.

00:05:25: Microsoft has thousands of partners who quote unquote.

00:05:28: Do Azure the field teams at Microsoft?

00:05:30: The actual sellers?

00:05:32: they don't know what to do with a generalist right.

00:05:34: Marina says you have to go in and say We solve this specific problem.

00:05:38: Enterprises hit when adopting azure DevOps that scale in the health care sector.

00:05:42: Okay That is very specific.

00:05:44: But why does that level of specificity matter so much to the Microsoft seller?

00:05:48: because of how they get paid.

00:05:50: And this brings us to Brian Kebler's advice, which was honestly some of the toughest love in the stack.

00:05:55: This week.

00:05:55: Oh yeah he did not hold back.

00:05:57: He basically said stop pitching your product features.

00:06:00: Microsoft sellers do NOT care about Your features

00:06:03: Which is so hard for Product people To hear.

00:06:05: we all Love our Features.

00:06:06: You just have to get over it.

00:06:08: Bryan explains that Microsoft Sellers Care About Their Quota Retirement.

00:06:12: That'S It.

00:06:13: They Care About Azure Consumption Metrics Which they Call ACR ERP Velocity and Co-Pilot Activation.

00:06:19: So if I go to a Microsoft seller and say, hey my software has the absolute best dashboard for budgeting they just tune out.

00:06:26: Completely.

00:06:27: But if you walk in and say, my software drives twenty percent more Azure consumption because of how we process massive data sets suddenly You are their best friend

00:06:36: Because you aren't selling a product anymore

00:06:38: Right?

00:06:38: You're selling there bonus

00:06:40: That is the pull versus push dynamic Inaction!

00:06:43: Your creating gravitational pull.

00:06:44: And If want to see what this looks like when it's fully engineered and working at scale... ...you really have look at workiva case study that Roman Kyrsanov broke down.

00:06:52: This analysis was wild.

00:06:54: Roman looked at their earnings call and the numbers were staggering.

00:06:58: Workiva is crossing a billion dollars in ARR, And the CEO highlighted fourteen major enterprise deals.

00:07:05: Do you remember how many involved to partner?

00:07:07: All fourteen

00:07:08: Every single one

00:07:09: That has hundred percent attachment on their marquee deals.

00:07:12: But what Roman pointed out, and this is the really engineered part.

00:07:15: Is that Workiva made a strategic choice to offload the implementation work?

00:07:19: entirely

00:07:20: Right they just gave service revenue directly to partners.

00:07:23: Exactly They recognized that Implementation is lower margin And honestly harder to scale than pure software.

00:07:29: So they feed all of that Revenue To The Partners

00:07:32: Which keeps Workiva's margins high

00:07:34: Which Wall Street loves.

00:07:35: It gives the partners A massive financial incentive to bring deals to Workiva

00:07:40: which the sales team loves.

00:07:42: It's a perfectly symbiotic ecosystem.

00:07:44: Roman also noted their cloud commitment, they have over one hundred and twenty million dollars in non-cancelable cloud infrastructure commitments through twenty twenty nine.

00:07:53: That signals serious alignment.

00:07:56: when you owe AWS or Google that much money?

00:07:59: You aren't just a guest in your house!

00:08:02: Right.

00:08:02: You are structurally aligned with their growth, you have to burn down that financial commitments but you design your go-to market to ensure consumption actually happens.

00:08:09: it literally forces YouTube.

00:08:11: build that machine.

00:08:12: Let's

00:08:12: say you aren't quite workiva yet...you're just trying to break into AWS.

00:08:15: Jen Dawson referenced a quote from Gino Cotignola who really struck me.

00:08:19: She said pipeline is earned not assigned.

00:08:22: That is the ultimate cold shower reality check.

00:08:25: There is zero entitlement in the AWS ecosystem.

00:08:29: Mogan AD backed this up too.

00:08:32: He noted that the messy middle, scaling from your first partnership to your hundredth is exactly where most companies die because they rely on casual intros like hey I know a guy at AWS...I'll shoot him an email!

00:08:44: That works perfectly for deal number one

00:08:46: but it doesn't work for Deal Number Fifty

00:08:48: Exactly.

00:08:49: Morgan argues you have to move to a governed motion.

00:08:52: Governed motion sounds very bureaucratic.

00:08:54: It sounds boring But its highly profitable.

00:08:57: It means joint pipeline reviews on a strict schedule.

00:09:00: it mean shared account plans that are actually tracked in the CRM.

00:09:03: moving

00:09:04: from we like each other to We have a Shared business plan, but we're held accountable for precisely so we had The internal plumbing fixed with rebops?

00:09:12: We at the external pitch perfectly aligned with the hyper scalars.

00:09:15: now We have talk about the accelerant AI

00:09:18: and to be clear we aren't talking About generative ai writing your follow-up emails.

00:09:22: We are talking about Ai as core infrastructure.

00:09:25: Jay McBain, who is honestly always ahead of the curve on this stuff noted that AI is touching every single lever now.

00:09:33: Incentives, governance and enablement.

00:09:37: but thing really caught my eye was shift in how we handle certifications.

00:09:41: Yes!

00:09:41: The competence currency.

00:09:43: Historically vendors would just ask partners How many sales reps do you have?

00:09:47: Because headcount equaled reach.

00:09:49: Right But they don't care about headcount.

00:09:51: They care about time to value.

00:09:52: Because

00:09:53: AI completely changes the map on what a single person can do!

00:09:56: Exactly, if one partner uses AI-assisted delivery... ...to implement your software in two weeks and another partner has fifty guys on the bench but takes six months to do that same job you want the first partner every time.

00:10:07: So vendors are actually starting to subsidize their competence.

00:10:10: they're using AI to verify real skills rather than just counting certifications hanging onto wall.

00:10:16: But on a practical day-to-day level, Greg Portnoy shared an example that I think every single partner manager listening to this will want to steal immediately.

00:10:24: The AI Partner Account Manager living inside Slack.

00:10:27: Oh!

00:10:27: This tackles the biggest silent killer of partnerships out there – portal fatigue?

00:10:33: Yes We all know the drill Welcome our partner Portal.

00:10:36: Please create unique password which includes symbol, hieroglyph and blood

00:10:42: And then you log out and literally never login again.

00:10:44: Never Again!

00:10:45: Partners absolutely hate portals, they live in Slack or Microsoft Teams.

00:10:50: So Greg talked about Euler's AI agent.

00:10:52: It allows partners to just ask questions directly on their native workflow.

00:10:57: Things like Where is my commission for that deal?

00:11:00: Or do have a one-pager security compliance?

00:11:03: The bot answers it right there in Slack Instantly,

00:11:05: Greg says it deflects ninety percent of those routine question.

00:11:09: Think what this does with the human partner manager.

00:11:11: Instead of spending your entire Tuesday answering, where is the logo file?

00:11:15: You're spending your day strategizing on a massive enterprise deal.

00:11:18: It just

00:11:18: totally removes the friction.

00:11:20: Craig Booth had a really similar example using Notebook LM which is actually The Tech powering this conversation right now.

00:11:26: he uses it specifically for enablement.

00:11:29: He calls its structure performance partnering.

00:11:32: He uploads a dense technical e-book, lets the AI generate quick explainer video or an audio summary and distributes that to partners.

00:11:41: It dramatically speeds up knowledge transfer.

00:11:44: So A.I gives you speed...and it gives you scale.

00:11:46: but there is always money's discussions.

00:11:50: The sources this week were very clear That You Cannot Automate Everything And This brings us To Our Final Theme The human element.

00:11:57: This is the real paradox here, we just spent ten minutes talking about APIs AI agents and hyperscalar consumption metrics but Rob Moyer came in with a post that basically said stop put down the tools immediately.

00:12:09: his advice was literally don't buy a PRM which seems highly contradictory to what We said earlier About revops integration.

00:12:16: it sounds contradictory But It's actually A sequencing argument.

00:12:18: yeah rob focuses on What he Calls stage zero.

00:12:20: okay if you are Just starting out or You're Launching a brand new partner type Do not buy software.

00:12:26: Software automates a process.

00:12:28: if you don't have a working process yet the software just automates your confusion.

00:12:31: So what is it successful stage year actually look like then?

00:12:34: It's founder led, its highly manual.

00:12:36: You prove that loop works with one partner.

00:12:38: first.

00:12:39: Use shared Slack channel as makeshift deal room.

00:12:42: You figure out exact motion Once it works repeatedly.

00:12:45: Then go by PRM to scale it.

00:12:47: He also warned about the first partner hire didn't he?

00:12:50: He did!

00:12:50: He says that Stage dies The moment attribution breaks.

00:12:54: If you are doing things manually, You have to be obsessive about hard coding partner sourced into the CRM.

00:13:01: if credit isn't there The trust just evaporates overnight.

00:13:05: And

00:13:05: Trust really is core currency here.

00:13:07: Tushar Ranka had a great point.

00:13:08: why sales reps ignore partners?

00:13:11: We usually assume they're lazy or greedy

00:13:14: But Tushara argues it's not motivation problem at all It's risk management.

00:13:18: Sales Reps naturally view partners as friction and risk.

00:13:22: They think Will this partner say something stupid in front of my biggest client?

00:13:25: Well, they slow down the deal cycle.

00:13:27: So the rep just hoards the deal to stay in control

00:13:30: exactly unless you can answer two very specific questions for them What is next step and who drives it?

00:13:37: if the rep knows Exactly what the partners going do The perceived risk goes down And the trust goes up.

00:13:43: It's a trust loop.

00:13:44: data builds trust crest build activity.

00:13:46: an Activity builds revenue but resources are finite.

00:13:50: We can't build deep trust with everyone equally.

00:13:53: Victor M brought up the twenty percent rule.

00:13:56: This is the brutal math of resource allocation.

00:13:58: The Pareto principle applies ruthlessly in channel marketing.

00:14:02: Twenty percent of your partners will drive eighty percent Of revenue.

00:14:05: So what do you Do at the other eighty percent of partners?

00:14:07: You ignore them Or rather, you automate Them using AI tools we just talked about.

00:14:12: Victor argues you should spend fully sixty percent of your human management time on that top tier one group.

00:14:17: That

00:14:18: is a huge concentration of effort!

00:14:20: It has to be, Breanna Popsen backed this up perfectly.

00:14:22: she said more partners does not equal more revenue.

00:14:25: Inactive partners are just noise in the system.

00:14:28: they clutter your database and they distract your partner team.

00:14:32: You were so much better off with ten highly activated partners than five hundred logos on a website who don't even know your core pitch.

00:14:39: This circles right back to Chip Rogers' point, where he referenced Ron Piavasan.

00:14:43: He said partnerships should always be a pull not a push.

00:14:47: That is the ultimate litmus test for everything we've discussed today.

00:14:51: If you are constantly nagging your direct sales reps To call a partner?

00:14:55: The value simply isn't there.

00:14:57: Stop pushing

00:14:58: Stop pushing and fix the value proposition.

00:15:00: if the value is real... ...if the partner actually helps close the deal faster or makes it bigger.. ..the reps will naturally pull them in.

00:15:08: Let's tie this all together for the listener.

00:15:09: We started with the idea of moving from opportunistic to engineered, right?

00:15:13: The pole dynamic is the ultimate result of good engineering.

00:15:16: if you fix the rev ops data so that CFO actually trusts it

00:15:19: and removes a friction

00:15:20: If you pitch the hyperscalars on their consumption metrics instead of your features

00:15:25: That creates the incentive!

00:15:30: That creates the speed.

00:15:32: And if you focus your human capital almost entirely on the top twenty percent of partners,

00:15:37: that creates the scale.

00:15:38: it really feels like channel marketing is finally growing up.

00:15:41: It's becoming less about networking and buying drinks at conferences and much more About architecture.

00:15:47: in economics?

00:15:48: It is becoming a hard science.

00:15:50: We are seeing a permanent shift from Channel management to ecosystem engineering.

00:15:56: The leaders who get this The ones who build the API integrations, Who define metrics early.

00:16:01: Who leverage AI to remove friction... They are going to win!

00:16:04: And those hoping for a lucky referral?

00:16:07: They're gonna be left completely behind.

00:16:09: Predictable really is key word here.

00:16:11: Board members love predictable CFOs love predictable

00:16:15: And partners love getting paid on time.

00:16:17: That too.

00:16:18: So Here's final thought to leave you with Something to mull over.

00:16:22: If AI eventually handles all the routine enablement, data syncing and portal navigation... The only thing left for human partner managers to do is build high stakes trust.

00:16:32: So look at your team!

00:16:34: Are you hiring partner managers today for their spreadsheet skills?

00:16:37: When should really be hiring them for emotional intelligence or strategic vision tomorrow?

00:16:42: That's a million dollar question.

00:16:43: Start with the data but end with Human Trust.

00:16:46: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:16:50: Also check out our other editions on account-based marketing field marketing AI and BDB marketing MarTech go to market and social selling.

00:16:57: Thank You for listening.

00:16:58: keep building those flywheels.

00:17:00: Thanks everyone!

00:17:01: And don't forget to subscribe.