Transcript

Balaji Subramanian:        So when I say I want to win the hearts and minds of your organization, how do I do that? What drives you? What’s your DNA? What’s your culture? How best do we approach that? They love it, right. They know that you’re caring about them.

Announcer:        Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast where you’ll hear leaders of partner programs talk about their greatest challenges and most successful solutions. And now your host, Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates.

Louis Gudema:  Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast where we talk with leaders in software partner programs to learn about what’s working today. And if you like what you hear, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening to this — that will help others learn about the podcast too.

Today I’m talking with Balaji Subramanian, Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel Sales at ServiceMax. Previously, Balaji has held senior channel roles at Informatica, Adobe, and Cisco. Balaji –welcome to the podcast!

Balaji:    Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me here today, Louis.

Louis:    Yeh, its early morning for you. I’m on the East coast, but thank you for doing this so early.

Balaji:    Oh, no problem at all. I am an early riser. And in fact, I find most of my energy being in the morning rather than later in the day. So this is perfect.

Louis:    So please fill us in a bit more with a bit more detail on your career path. What brought you to your focus on the channel? What do you like about working on the channel?

Balaji:    Yeh. Yeh, it has been an interesting career path. I actually, my educational background and my first couple of roles were actually in finance. So I have a bachelor’s in finance and a master’s in economics, and that’s how I started out my career. The good news about that is that that particular background has helped me throughout my career, including today as I find myself in a channel role. But because of my background in finance and because of being able to work with, you know, P&Ls and understanding a P&L, and my nature of being somewhat quantitative also — I moved into really supporting sales and sales operations, sales planning, strategy planning with sales and business planning after that. Which eventually led me to a role in the channel.

I mean it actually started out, I would say probably more seriously back at Adobe at that point in time, we were still, Adobe was still a licensing company, not quite a subscription company. And I remember our worldwide AVP of sales coming to my manager and I and said, You know, we have these partner programs sort of all over the world, sprinkled around all over the world. But it’s not really one program. There’s no governance behind it, there’s no cadence behind it. I don’t know how to measure our partners.

And so that’s really kind of what I sort of jumped into. And that led to myself and working with our extended team, creating the Adobe partner connection program, which I think still exists today and still at that time actually a licensing company. So we designed, architected, deployed it with my teammates around the world, country by country, region by region. And then a year or two later we became a subscription company. Adobe was one of the first companies, real major software companies to move over to the subscription world. Which really made us relook at the program and try to understand how best we can continue to motivate our partners, have the right partners, reward them in a meaningful way and drive their behavior around subscription rather than licensing.

And so I went through that whole process once again with that Adobe Partner Connection program, converting it from a licensing focus program to a subscription-focused program. That’s what sort of led me to Informatica where I actually came over on the direct side. I was actually chief of staff for our cloud sales teams because the company wanted to again move over to the cloud, move over to subscription, and my experience at Adobe I think was attractive to them so that’s why I joined them, on the direct side though. I ended up actually running their cloud sales team on the direct side for a couple of years and integrating it back into sort of the mainstream Informatica business.

And then the company asked me, Informatica asked me, hey, same kind of question as I was asked at Adobe, You know, we don’t really have a full total partner program. We want to do more with our partners. We need to be able to grow and scale. We need to have the right partners. And so again, my teammates and I, we kind of got together and created a new reseller program, which we never had there before. Recruited distributors, resellers around the world, focused on our global system integrators also, and our local system integrators. And sort of started to roll that out also. And that’s what led me now to ServiceMax, same kind of thing, ServiceMax is at a, what I’ll call a nascent stage of growth. We’re very, very excited with sort of the TAM in front of us, opportunities in front of us, and again, the company recognizes that we need the indirect channel. We need our partners to be able grow and scale and effectively make our customers successful.

So that’s a quick overview of sort of where I was and how I started and where I am now. I love working with partners. I love working with sales, that sort I would say my sweet spot. Those finance skills that I had, the P&L background, the sales operations background, all of that came into play and helped me become a much better channel leader, which I’m grateful for.

Louis:    Yeh, I’ve had a number of guests who have that kind of finance background and it does seem to be a great background wherever they go in business. I was actually surprised, I recently read Phil Knight’s memoir about the founding of Nike. And he had a background in accounting, also. Even though they became this very creative company and one that you know, was very product-focused, it was a very valuable thing to have.

Balaji:    Yes, absolutely. You know, knowing the P&L and sitting across from your CFO and talking about a partner program and the margin that a partner can earn or should earn. And the ROI that we should expect and modeling it and all that, it’s very helpful to have that type of background and it’s served me well.

Louis:    So you mentioned a number of things I want to get to as we talk today when you’re talking about your background, but first just briefly about ServiceMax. You provide a field service management and as a service management software. So do you sell primarily to enterprises and large midmarket companies or do you also sell to smaller companies?

Balaji:    Yeh, great question. I would say right now, and in fact the timing of your question is perfect too, because we’re in, we’re entering our Q4 today actually, December 1st and we’re looking at next year obviously from a planning standpoint. But right now I would say the way we, if you could think of that classical triangle, right, and you have strategic enterprise type of accounts up on top and sort of mid-market SMB type of customers down at the bottom. Right now our focus has been on what I’ll say a lot more on the enterprise type of accounts, larger accounts. And it’s something that I had to learn a key sort of a nomenclature. A KPI that we use here is how many technicians does that customer have, right? And so we define an enterprise type of customer that has at least 200 probably technicians, 150, 200 technicians or higher.

Many of our deals and many of our opportunities that we’re pursuing have technicians of even 1,000 – 2,000 technicians. So rather large enterprise kind of companies that have a large technician workforce right. But we’ve recognized that it’s great to have these large deals and be able to go after enterprise accounts. But there’s a whole host of, to your point, mid-market SMB type of customers who, you know, might have a hundred technicians, 50 technicians, 75 technicians that we’re really not serving well.

And guess what, that’s a great place and a great spot for partners to play a role in. And that’s really one of the things that I’m looking at right now. I’ve been at ServiceMax for about five months now and looking at that SMB play and mid-market play. And trying to understand what type of packaging pricing products should we have, what kind of support level should we have and go after that. Because we want to have that run rate business and we want to be able to serve those customers effectively in the market. So that is something that we’re going to be focused on quite a bit, and partners are going to play a big role in that as we go into next fiscal year for us.

Louis:    Yeh, it is something that I see at a number of companies that the channel is especially important if they really start to go after the SMB market. Because a small number of partners or even their own enterprise sales team may be able to be successful in the enterprise space. But when you’re talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of SMBs that you’re trying to reach globally, you really need something that can expand your reach.

Balaji:    Exactly, exactly. That’s exactly what we’re looking at as our coverage model or capacity model and how best to be able to do that properly.

Louis:    What is your global footprint? What continents or what countries, how many countries are you operating in?

Balaji:    It’s fairly global in nature, clearly obviously North America. We even have opportunities down in Latin America as we speak. In fact, it’s being run through a partner. Clearly in Europe, pretty much all of Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, we call it ENAT. And then of course Japan, Australia, and I would say some of the Asian countries, ASEAN countries I’ll call them, that we do deal with them. So fairly well sort of spread across the world. But naturally most of our business still comes from North America and Europe. But we obviously have growth aspirations that’ll continue to take us to different parts of the world.

Louis:    And what’s the profile of a ServiceMax partner? What kind of companies are partners?

Balaji:    Great question. That’s something, yeh, I’m continuing to look at. Easy answer right off the top of my head are sort of really three types of partners, right. One is your typical global system integrators. So I’m talking about partners like Accenture or TCS or Wipro or CaP Gemini, people like that, partners like that that we’re working with. I have partner managers who are actually covering those types of partners and we’re working with them closely. Because all of them have, you know, sort of this digital transformation effort going on with their respective customers who happen to be many of our customers too. So working with them jointly is very important for us, having a joint business plan, a go-to market approach. They have field service management practices.

So identifying those leaders and practice leads has been something that we’ve been focusing on the last few months, and then nurturing and developing that relationship and, of course, putting on paper a business plan is something that we’re doing.

The other type of partner is what I’ll call our regional system integrator, or maybe even a regional reseller to some extent at times. And these are of course smaller partners and these are the ones that I really would love to be able to use to focus on our mid-market type of customer. And so these are, you know, local ones and could be in Dubai, could be in Turkey, could be here in North America on the East coast or the West coast you know, in Australia. Whatever it might be, and these guys need probably a slightly different type of partner agreement, for example. A different type of business plan, a different type of enablement. They’re smaller, they need a little bit more help from us on certain things. But they could be very nimble and agile and very, very loyal too, which is important, and strong advocates for us.

So I’m actually very excited to kind of go after them and to build up, not a lot, less is more is what I’m saying. And so I don’t want to have hundreds of partners, like just, you know, almost a handful of partners. But who can be very strong advocates for us in the market and be very competent and skilled.

And then the third type of partner is really that partner who’s focused primarily on just services. So they’re skilled and we can give them services work in terms of either subcontracting with us as we deploy a solution to a customer, they can do that type of work. So, but you know, a very important partner for us also, because as you know, we all care about one thing, making sure that our customers are successful, right. One of our taglines and one of our philosophies actually within ServiceMax that our CEO’s driving is really being obsessed with our customer, right. And so we want partners who are equally obsessed with customers and customer success. And so all three sets of partners we’re looking at, we’re trying to make sure that we’re aligned around that and really focus on the customer.

Louis:    Well, you must be doing something right. I saw that you were in the upper right quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, so you have a terrific solution there. You know, you were saying that when you were at Adobe, your partners had to make that sale on premise transition to cloud subscription transition. And are you still seeing that happen with ServiceMax partners or have they crossed that divide?

Balaji:    They have, I would say primarily crossed that divide. When I was at Adobe that was, when was that, that’s probably about seven years ago, or eight years ago, and the world was a, it’s a different place back then, right. Then the world was just kind of moving over, talking a lot about cloud and moving over. I would say now that has happened. The partners who are probably still clinging on to, I would say licensing type of sales, they’re probably fewer, everybody understands a lot more the subscription model. We are a software subscription company, right. We don’t sell any on-prem type of products or solution. So any partner who works with us obviously has to be comfortable with that. And all of them that I’ve seen so far understand that sort of work within that business model.

Louis:    Well, central to success in that business model also is having those add-on services. Usually the partners make much more from their additional services than they do from whatever percentage of the subscription dollars they may get. So is that true for your partners as well?

Balaji:    Absolutely. In fact, I always say that the smart partners understand that very quickly. And that is one thing that I have been always talking to our partners about, even when I was at Informatica is what I call the services drag. So for every software dollar sold, you know how much services you will be getting. And the higher that factor is, the better it is for our partners. So for example, here at ServiceMax, I’ve seen anywhere from 2 to 10 X of services for every software dollar sold. And that’s a very attractive, meaningful sort of feature or attribute I guess, of our products and solutions and our business model for partners.

So they understand that that’s how they’re going to make a lot of their money. That’s how they’re going to make a lot of their margin. And being able to work with us, with the customer, being able to make sure that that software that is sold could be part of a bigger solution. But it solves for that business outcome that the customer really wants and the partner’s right there to be able to deploy it and provide that services after the sale, that’s the type of partner that we want. That’s the type of partner that’s going to be successful.

And we’ll be able to make sure that we jointly make sure that that customer is successful and the adoption is high because as a subscription company, as you can well imagine, we care about our renewals, right. That’s the only way we’re going to do well is if we make sure that that first sale, the customer is successful, and they’re happy and they want to come and renew it. That’s how we’re going to get our recurring revenue. And so it’s super, super important.

So we are absolutely looking for partners who understand that and focus on those services. And that’s why enablement, and I’m kind of jumping maybe to another topic there, Louis. But enablement of that partner is my number one priority almost. Winning the hearts and minds of partners is something that I always say within the hallways of ServiceMax is we have to win the hearts and minds of our partners, and the only way to do that is to make sure they’re successful. So let’s enable them, let’s make them skilled, let’s make them competent. And make sure that their success then becomes our success.

Louis:    Well, I’ve heard from other channel leaders that enablement is the hardest thing that they do, too.

Louis:    It is. It really is. Because we do then have to depend upon an extended set of stakeholders within for example ServiceMax. So I would say, you know, everyone from our product teams, our R&D teams, our professional services teams by the way, and obviously our own, what I’ll call enablement teams. So, for example, here at ServiceMax, the first three reqs that I got — the first three people that I hired — are people who we’ve created a little partner success and enablement team. And so I want them really focused on making sure that the partner is successful and enabled effectively. So it is hard, harder I guess to some extent, but it’s fine. It can be done and it’s great to rally the troops so to speak and create that partner centricity within a company. And I think that’s what the opportunity that we have here at ServiceMax is to be able to do that to really kind of put in that DNA into our company of being partner-centric. This is one of the key things that we need to do.

Louis:    Well, keeping ServiceMax top of mind at the partners obviously is very important. So are there things that you learned at Adobe or at Informatica that you brought over to ServiceMax in terms of staying top of mind that you could share?

Balaji:    Yeh, absolutely. And it’s funny, one thing I learned — to answer your question — is that partners will always work with our competition. We just have to embrace that and accept it. And each of my companies, you know, I’ll have, you know, my stakeholders within the company say, Oh my gosh, why is that partner working with a competitor. Why can’t they, how come they can’t just work with us? And I tell them, that’s really never going to happen right. Let’s just be open about this and frank about this is that they will always want to be able to look at, not just us, but our competitors too. And you know, it’s the wise thing for them to do.

Our task is to make sure that they work with us more and more and more, and work with our competitors less and less and less right. And make sure, to the point, you know, having us at top of their mind when they get up every morning, they’re thinking about ServiceMax, which is very important. And so how do you do that? It’s really not that hard. It’s a little difficult, more difficult to do, but it’s not that hard.

And what I mean by that is, going back to what I said earlier, how do you win the hearts and minds of these people? How do you win the hearts and minds of those individuals who sit there within the partner organization that you’re working with? And again, now it depends upon the type of partner.

So I’ll give a good example with our global system integrators. As you know these guys are huge, they’re large, they’re just thousands of people. And so picking the right group, picking that right practice, understanding how they’re organized between client-partner leads, they’re spread across the world, who own a P&L and those delivery practice leads with many of them who sit in India. And understanding the vertical practice leads who are also spread across the company and the world. And making sure that you identify them. Almost have an org chart put in place that we go after and nurture, nurture them, develop that relationship, provide them valuable information, how you differentiate yourself from your competitors.

And then most importantly, making sure that they’re skilled. And so there’s many ways of doing that, of course, is having an accreditation program, a certification program, more importantly, a career. So a lot of these GSIs, they hire lots of people and when those practitioners come on board, they’re trying to figure out how can I make my career here sitting at Accenture or Deloitte or Wipro or TCS, right. Is it with Cisco, is it with VMware, is it with Adobe, is it ServiceMax, and you look at them and say yes.

You know, by having these skills and understanding how big a TAM we have in front of us and being able to be skilled and resource that way you can actually make a career of yourself. Developing your own company focusing on us, you know service transformation, right. And so that’s one thing, is to be able to do that. The smaller partners, I mean, like I said, they’re nimble and agile, they love this kind of stuff.

And the more love that we can provide them, the more attention we can provide them, and the more information that we can give to them so they become advocates of us, they’ll get up every morning thinking of us. And that’s what I’ve seen. I’ve learned this over the years from my different companies that I’ve worked at, is to focus on that in a very deliberate, purposeful manner.

Again, like I said, make it part of our DNA and good things happen because we’re all people. You work with people who you like. You work with people who show you love. You work with people who really care about you. And if you show that in a very deliberate, purposeful manner, I always see people just responding equally well and they become true loyal advocates of us. So I’m a strong believer in that.

Louis:    So how many partners does ServiceMax have? What kind of percentage contribution to revenue is the channel making for ServiceMax?

Balaji:    Two questions you asked. The first one is that we have our typical GSIs, a handful of them. And, like I said, less is more so I’m trying to kind of really focus on only about three to four right now. And then we probably have — I’d say — we’re trying to limit to maybe 30 to 40, I would say regional system integrators. So the regional type of partners mostly populated in Europe and North America, like I said before. And then we’ll have, I would say again, probably a handful of what you’ll call true, your services type of subcontracting type of partners who just focus on delivery and nothing else.

And so it’s, you know, we try to keep it to a, not too big of an ecosystem, but a very strong competent, agile type of ecosystem. In fact, the business plans that I build with these guys I’m calling bespoke type of partner plans. And so I don’t mind if it’s a little different from each other. Obviously you want some consistency from a partner program standpoint. But I don’t mind having it slightly different so it becomes meaningful for that respective partner right.

Because like at Adobe we had thousands of partners, right. And so I couldn’t do any bespoke partner program. We had to have one partner program that might look different in Japan versus North America versus Europe, a slight difference, but pretty much the same. Here though what I’m hoping to do is to have a little bit more of a bespoke type of approach where you know we can sit down with our partner and say, what is really meaningful for you? How many resources do you have? Like what is more important to you? This or that right, and be able to do some differences there that are meaningful for them. So again they become very loyal and advocates of us.

Your second question was the percentage of I think bookings that we get through our partner ecosystem. I’m just putting in, you know, pretty transparent here, that sort of dashboard and the ability to really track that. And one of the things I did when I first joined was because I noticed that it was sort of all over the place in terms of how we track this. And so I’ve introduced two definitions that we’re all adopting. You know what is an influenced deal, a referred deal from a partner. And what is a sourced deal from a partner. And using those two definitions to really make sure that we track any opportunity coming in. We get our regional sales VP approvals to make sure that we’re all in alignment right and putting that in place.

And so what I see is as we become, as we mature as an organization and certainly as a partner organization, that I would expect 30%, 40% of our bookings over the next three years to come from our partner ecosystem. That’s an important KPI. That’s something that our board wants. Obviously my manager our chief revenue officer wants, our CEO wants, our CFO wants, is to be able to see that. And so that’s really where we’ve set our goals is to get to that point over the next two to three years.

Louis:    Okay. In terms of hitting that goal, is that a matter of recruiting a lot more partners or growing the partners you already have? How do you think you’ll be increasing the contribution of the channel to ServiceMax’s revenue over the next few years?

Balaji:    Yeh. It’s sort of both of what you just said. Clearly, I do need to recruit more partners, especially ones that are focused on that mid-market play. Now I am dependent upon the company by the way. I don’t know, I forget, I might’ve mentioned or not mentioned this earlier. But I am dependent upon the company to say, How do we have the right product, maybe a lighter version of our current product or platform for the mid-market customer? How do we package that properly? How do we price it properly, etcetera.

But I do need to recruit more partners around the world who can focus on that type of sales motion or that type of sales play. And then of course, as you know, GSIs, they care about increasing wallet share within a small set of customers that they focused on platinum accounts, diamond accounts, whatever each of the GSIs might call them. But they’re focusing on 150-200 accounts at most. And so we want to make sure that we align with whatever ones that are common, and make sure that we increase our wallet share within those accounts also.

So the GSIs will play a good role in those. Mid-market type of partners certainly will help us capture new logos. Less is more. So again, I don’t want to have a huge ecosystem. The other thing that I’m doing differently that I should probably talk about here is as you probably have heard, I haven’t used the word resell that often in the last few minutes that we’ve been chatting. I’m still looking at this as a co-sale type of sales motion. There’ll be certain countries and certain transactions that might be a resell transaction but I’m still looking at this as wanting to make sure that we’re all aligned. The direct sales organization and the partner organization are aligned as we go to market together. And it’s a more of a co-sale transaction. But I expect that we will have a reseller program probably within the next six to nine months where we can make it a little bit more attractive for partners to truly resell.

But as you know, I want to make sure that those partners who do resell are competent and skilled and they could run the sales motion effectively. And they don’t need as much help from us. And that takes a little bit more effort and hard work from our part. I’ve learned that over the years. And so I’m going slowly into the resell world, but full jumping in the co-sale world with GSIs and regional SI. The other thing I’ll point out also is the services. This is an important piece for us as we talked about earlier. Any partner, GSI, regional SI, obviously our delivery partners, they all care about services revenue. We want those types of partners.

And so we are making sure that they understand, we are declaring to them that we are not a services company, we are a software company. So we’re repeating that to them so they know that we don’t want to compete with them. And in fact we want them to do more and more services. So I am working with our professional services team, so we do have a PS team here working with them to say, Okay, how best do we do this? What are the kinds of opportunities should you, the PS team focuses on, maybe more of the strategic types of accounts that you focus on. But everything else, we pretty much go to a partner from a services standpoint. And not only do they subcontract, but you know, we actually let them prime the deal.

And so that is an important business model change that we’re going to be putting into effect. And it’s a behavioral change even within our company to be able to do that effectively too. So that’s something else that I’m focusing on. And then of course, you know, the partner program itself, we want to be industry-leading. We want to make sure that it’s profitable for our partners to co-sell with that, the behavior that we want from them is of course new logos, sourcing deals from us and then customer adoption, right, making sure that the customer is successful.

And so when I’m looking at my financial incentives on how we should reward our partners, it’s really centered around those three things: sourcing deals, new logos, and customer adoption. I’m still trying to figure out what are the right KPIs, or it might be the best KPIs to measure that success.

Louis:    That’s very valuable what you were saying about defining what’s essentially, what’s theirs and what’s yours. Kind of the good fences make good neighbors?

Balaji:    Right. Yes, absolutely. That’s a good way of doing it. Good neighbors, right. They’re an extended part of our team, they’re an extended part of our community, an extended part of our neighborhood. And we should love them, and in return they’ll love us.

Louis:    Yeh. So the GSIs, the large companies you work with, my area is marketing and so they no doubt have marketing well in hand. But some of the smaller or mid-sized partners you work with. Do you find that they’re good at marketing or is that part of the enablement that you have to do for them or with them?

Balaji:    Great question. Yeh, no, great question. Something I learned along the way also is that your typical regional partner is small, and they don’t have lots of resources. They might have a person who’s designated, not dedicated, but designated to do marketing stuff. But it’s a quarter of their time, half their time, certainly not full time. So for those types of partners, absolutely we need to be able to work with them and help them from a marketing standpoint, demand gen standpoint, awareness standpoint, those kinds of things we need to do. So, we have my colleagues in partner marketing, that’s something that we’ll be putting together a plan around how best to help these smaller partners.

And by the way, equally complicated sometimes even to work with GSIs on marketing because they’re fragmented and they’re matrix organization are something, is difficult to actually work with them also. But anyway, partner marketing is something that is a close obviously stakeholder of ours. And we work with them very closely as part of our extended team. And we’re looking at, Okay, how do we do this from a campaign standpoint to drive demand? How do we do this from a campaign standpoint to drive awareness? How do we do this from a brand standpoint? I was just in Tokyo a few weeks ago and one of our partners there said, Okay, let’s do something together so we can increase the awareness of you and us working together in the market. This was a large GSI which we love to hear. And so one of the first easy things we thought we could do is thought leadership.

So that particular managing director of that GSI who sits there, we’re actually doing a blog with him. And so we’re interviewing him and you know about field service and the opportunities and things like that and during a blog, and we’ll be publishing that.

I’m doing the same thing with another partner in Germany. And so thought leadership is an important part of marketing, I think. And then you’ve got the tactical things of campaigns and things like that also. But really coming back to your original question, those smaller partners do need our help. What I’ve done before and again, I had a great colleague at Informatica, part of our marketing lead there, we set up a concierge type of service. And we were able to help our partners just take the content, put their logo on it, and use that a lot. And so concierge type of service is something that we probably look at also to provide to our partners, especially our smaller partners.

Louis:    Yeh. With some partners I imagine it’s, you can do through-partner marketing or co-marketing. But other partners that don’t have much of a marketing skill, you may just, they’re expecting you to do the marketing for them essentially.

Balaji:    Yes, exactly. Yeh. And I’ve seen that, you know, when I was at my previous companies, you know, your typical regional partner was maybe about, I don’t know, anywhere from 10 to $20 million of revenue. So not that big. So they would not have resources to be able to do that. And so we would have to help them. And I expect to do the same thing here also. And how we use our budget is that something that we’re going to look at? Is how much do we spend with our regional partners? How much do we spend with our GSIs? By the way, from a partner program standpoint, I’m still looking at, Do I need to accrue partner development funds? How much do I accrue? How should I use that effectively?

This, by the way, this is handy to have my finance background, because then I can sit across a finance team saying this is why we need to do this. This is what we need to accrue, and by the way, we can accrue it as either contrary revenue or we can do it as opex depending upon how we use it. And so just having that type of conversation provides some level of, I think reassurance to our finance team, it’s also that we’re doing this right. So but anyway, I digress.

Louis:    No, no, that’s interesting. So I want to ask you two questions that are variations of what I sometimes ask when I’m hiring people. First, what’s a partner campaign or program that you’ve done — and it doesn’t have to be at ServiceMax, it could be at one of the earlier companies you were at — a campaign or program that you think was especially successful that you’re especially proud of?

Balaji:    Yeh. So I certainly cannot take credit for this individually you know, it’s obviously a team effort. And like I said, I had a great partner, no pun intended, in partner marketing with me who worked with me at my past company. But just to give you an example, we had different customer journeys. So we identified four customer journeys from my last company and we’ll probably do something similar here. So at ServiceMax we’re really going to be focused on verticals. So that’s one of the strategies that has come out of our executive leadership team and the board meetings over the last few weeks is to say Let’s not dilute our efforts. Let’s make sure that we strengthen our efforts by really focusing on a three or four vertical industry that we’re really strong in and where our platform, our products and solutions really resonate within that industry.

So what does that mean? Well, it’s medical devices. Its oil and gas. It’s industrial manufacturing. It could be utilities, aviation, right? So it’s going to be three to four types of vertical industries that are going to be very important for us. And so my thinking is that any type of campaign that we’re going to put together should center around those verticals and the story behind each vertical. And to make sure that it resonates loud and clear with those customers sitting within that vertical industry, how differentiate ourselves and the value that we offer from a business outcome standpoint. And that’s a very important thing that we focus on is business outcomes.

As you know over the years, partners in the past would transact, right. And that’s the reseller model a little bit more but they would transact. But in this day and age where we have digital transformation occurring all around us, all of our customers are going through that digital transformation. What they care most about is that business outcome. Are you going to increase my revenue? Are you going to increase my uptime? Are you going to drive down my cost right? Are you going to increase my customer sat scores with my customers. So it’s those business outcomes and decision-makers more and more and more our line of business people. They’re the ones who are driving the budget and driving the decisions.

So long answer to your question from a campaign standpoint, I think what we’ll be probably pulling together is campaigns around specific industries. And I started out by talking about my previous company. We did the same thing there, also at Informatica, where we have customer journeys as we call them around data integration, around master data management, around data security, whatever. And so we did have partner campaigns with collateral, with a third party type of companies who helped us work with that partner and go after targeted customers with that story. And be able to get that interest from them and get leads from them and bring them in and make them either a new customer for us or maybe an existing customer who hadn’t thought about it for us to be able to resurrect their interest in us.

So it’s those kinds of things that I think we’ll do more of here at ServiceMax as we go forward also is really working on those customer stories, and that in this case, vertical industries to make sure we’re focused and aligned on how we go to market.

Louis:    Yeh, it sounds like very valuable marketing work. So then the flip side of that question: What was a partner program or campaign that you worked on that wasn’t successful, and why do you think that was?

Balaji:    You know, not to be too critical, but we had one, one comes to mind right away, I’ve had campaigns — I’ll call them campaigns that we used with a distributor. It was much focused on, I don’t know, spray, just spraying out there, right? And so it was not focused, it was much more a type of a reach kind of campaign. But what it did was it diluted the messaging, I would say it diluted the effort. It wasn’t successful in reaching out or even hitting the right targets. So it became very diluted.

And the distributor did it obviously with good intention. But the methodology and the practice that was used in just taking it and saying, Oh, let’s just go off and go after these 200 partners and take it to them and you know, take it through them. We got very little return on that, because it wasn’t done in a very deliberate, purposeful manner once we handed it off to them. And so that’s an example. We don’t want to do that. We want to be very deliberate. We want to be very purposeful. We want to make sure that the campaign is structured in a meaningful manner. It resonates with people, it resonates with partners. It actually has those customer stories properly, and it hits the right person.

So I don’t mind even doing it very slowly frankly. We have the luxury of doing that. We’re not $1 billion, $5 billion company. We’re a much smaller company so we can do these things in a much more deliberate, purposeful manner and that’s what I’m hoping to do with my partner marketing team and other stakeholders within the company.

Louis:    Okay. So what should I have asked you about today that I didn’t? What keeps you up at night?

Balaji:    What keeps me up at night? I think there’s probably three things that are, you know, I always like the number three. So maybe I’ll try and give you three things that are top of mind as I kind of go through any typical day.

One is understanding and aligning with the company’s go-to market. I’ve been in, I mentioned earlier at the beginning of the podcast, in a few different companies. And at times I’ve seen how a partner organization can distance itself from the company’s go-to market, and specifically even the company’s sales go-to-market and route to market approach. And that’s something top of mind for me always is What is our sales go to market. Is it enterprise versus at market, is it vertical industries, is it a combination of those? And so I, as sort of the partner leader here, need to make sure that I’m very, very aligned with that and just lock-step with my colleagues on the direct side and others within the company. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is I always, always care about are we winning the hearts and minds of our partners. Then like I said, I always bring that up and it’s an easy thing to say, people understand it after they think about it for a bit. And it becomes, it resonates with partners. So when I say I want to win the hearts and minds of your organization, how do I do that? What drives you? What’s your DNA? What’s your culture? How best do we approach that? They love it. They know that you’re caring about them. And so I always talk to my organization about that. How do we do this properly? And so that’s probably the second thing I’m always thinking about is: are we doing the right things to win the hearts and minds of our partners? Are we moving quickly, fast enough?

And that’s probably my third thing is my current manager, I use something that he talks to me about and he’s mentioned to me is that time is not our friend. Speed is our currency. And so that’s something I’ve adopted also with my team, is that we got to be nimble. We got to be agile. Being 70% correct is fine, as long as we’re directionally sound, let’s go. So let’s not be afraid to try out things and move at speed, but always with that hearts and minds of our partners in mind. So those are probably three things that I always think about every day and make sure that we’re moving with that deliberate, purposeful manner on all three things together.

Louis:    Yeh, those are three great things. The last one reminds me of a client I had at IBM who used to say the good program that launches is better than the perfect program that doesn’t.

Balaji:    Exactly, absolutely, yes. A lot of times we get paralyzed, right, in uncertainty or fear. And it’s funny, you know, we talked about my finance background and that really helps me kind of take away that uncertainty and fear. And I can sit down and go through a lot of analysis and modeling and things like that and take away some of that so we know where we are. We’ve got to go, let’s go, the direction is sound. Let’s just do this.

Louis:    Okay, great. So Balaji this was terrific. How can people contact you if they want to learn more about ServiceMax and your partner program?

Balaji:    Yeh, they can just contact me at Balaji at servicemax.com. Easy way to get hold of me. I’m pretty good about reading emails and staying on top of emails. So feel free to do that. I rely, by the way, upon a number of other channel partner leaders here in the Bay Area where I live to share ideas and get best practices.

In fact, I think a week from today I’m meeting with another partner leader here for another company, and he’s talked to me about how he measures customer adoption KPIs. What KPIs he uses with partners around customer adoptions. I said, Man, that’d be great to learn from you. So I’m sitting down with him and sharing some war stories and learning from him.

So I would love to learn from all of you out there and share any best practices from my side also, very collaborative. Hopefully as you can hear I’m a friendly guy. I love to talk to people and work with people. So feel free to contact me, Balaji at servicemax.com

Louis:    Okay. And are you very active on LinkedIn or other social media networks or is email.

Balaji:    Yeh, email is fine, but LinkedIn is great. You’ll probably, if you’re LinkedIn to me at any point in time, I probably you know, post something about once a week or so. So not every day, but probably about once a week or so. So, yeh, absolutely.

Louis:    All right, terrific. Well, we’ll post those in the show notes on revenueassociates.biz when the episode is live.

So thank you for joining us today Balaji. As I do with all guests I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation. It was recently named One of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time.

Balaji:    Oh wow. Fantastic. Thank you. And that’s a privilege to get that from you. I appreciate that, and having me on your show, it’s great.

Louis:    And thank you for listening to the Software Channel Partner Podcast, and please subscribe and listen to future episodes.