Transcript

Carmen Sorice:  We also, without giving away trade secrets, Louis, we also look at the partner sellers on an individual name basis. Who are the individuals, who are the humans, who are selling deals with us? And if a partner organization has a thousand sellers and we have three of them doing business with us, that’s an addressable market we need to go after.

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. I’m Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates, where we help companies grow faster by helping their channel partners market better and grow faster.

Today I’m talking with Carmen Sorice III, vice president for global partners success at Commvault. Carmen has also held senior channel positions at Sungard and Alcatel-Lucent, founded his digital transformation consultancy Qlarity, served on advisory boards for CompTIA, Baptie and others, has received many industry awards from CRN, and others and is the author of the 2018 book From the Lab Room to the Board Room: Keys to Making a Successful Career Transition from the Technical World to the Business World. There is more, but we need to leave some time to hear from Carmen. So Carmen, welcome to the podcast.

Carmen:               Excellent. Thank you for the introduction Louis. I really look forward to having this discussion. Thanks.

Louis:    Please fill us in a bit more about your career path. You know, I touched on some of the channel-related matters, but you’ve also been a sales director and product manager. What brought you to your focus on the channel over the past dozen years or so?

Carmen:               Great question. So I started my career in technology as an engineer working for AT&T Bell Laboratories. And after doing that for a few years, I realized that I had a desire to be more on the business side of things. That got me into product management, a little bit of marketing, business strategy. And then when I went to move further into business or further into sales, I was attracted to alliance management and partner sales and I’ve been doing that probably for the past 15 years. That’s how I got to channels. The reason I stay in channels is I’m passionate about helping other companies grow their businesses. So, yes, I’m in the business of selling technology and selling software, but when you work in and around channels, you do that all with the objective of helping your partners grow their business.  Every partner is different, every business model is different. And so that adds a creative aspect to the job and being in the channel business. So that’s why I remain in that business.

Louis:    Yeh, that’s a great approach and that’s absolutely true. You know, it’s interesting talking to different people on the podcast, how some people are a little more focused on selling through the channel. And some people are more focused like you are on helping partners grow their businesses and that includes kind of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ attitude that will also include selling more of their solutions too. So Commvault is an enterprise with about 2,500 employees. Please tell people what Commvault does and who you sell to?

Carmen:               Sure, sure. So Commvault helps customers manage their data, use their data, protect their data. We do that with a lot of enterprise firms who have very complex environments where they have a lot of data on their prem. They’ve accelerated moving data into the cloud, into public clouds. So we really help customers manage their data across multiple platforms. We make sure they have access to their data, they protect their data. And really more and more we’re helping customers extract more value from their data by knowing how to index it, knowing how to utilize it. And so that’s what we do.

Louis:    So you’re pretty exclusively focused on enterprises or do you get into the mid-market or small companies at all?

Carmen:               Yeh, great question Louis. So no, we’re not exclusive to the enterprise. A significant percentage of our business over the past, call it 5-10 years, has definitely come from the enterprise space. But we do have a good amount of revenue and a nice customer base in the mid-market segment. Because some of the characteristics of an IT environment are the same and some of these mid-market customer, mid-market environments where you have companies who maybe started on-prem moving to the cloud, they have a complex environment they’re looking for some help with. And so a bulk of our business is in the enterprise space. We do have solutions that scale very nicely down into the mid-market space. And you’re going to continue to see innovation from our company to expand in that segment even further.

Louis:    Yeh, some of those larger mid-market companies are pretty sizable and many of them are going to become enterprises in a year or two or very soon also. Yours is a new position at Commvault. You’ve been there, it’ll be just a year in a few weeks, but what prompted them to create this position and what’s your mission?

Carmen:               So what prompted Commvault to create the position is they decided a little over a year ago to once again continue to increase their investment in and around partnerships. And they decided at that time that they wanted someone coming in with channel experience to head up channel enablement, partner enablement, enhancing the partner programs, enhancing the way we communicate to and with our partners. So think of it as a shared service organization that works across the globe so that we can help the different regions — Asia Pacific, our AMEA region, our Americas region — get our hands around how we do those functions with partners in a global fashion rather than doing it more on a theater by theater or country by country situation, which is what it was in the past. So that’s what prompted them to fill the position.

What attracted me, I know that’s not what you asked, but what attracted me to it was Commvault being the company that it has been, which is a world leader in data backup and data management. And I just saw a great opportunity to take a really good company with a really good culture and really help us get to that next phase of growth that we need to get to. And the way we’re going to get there is by better enabling our partners, making sure they know how to sell faster with us, making sure they can get their close rates up when they work with us, making sure they can land and expand more with us than they would be able to with our competitors. So that was very attractive to me and that’s what brought me to the position.

Louis:    Is all of this a reflection of Commvault now moving to being more channel-centric instead of direct looking for the channel to drive a higher proportion of its revenue?

Carmen:               Yeh, that’s an interesting question. The answer’s yes, but we’re not coming from a situation where we were a direct company. We have had a significant portion of our revenue — think 90 plus percent of our revenue — that comes in through partners with partners. I think the change we’re seeing is we’ve had, like many companies have, a sales force out there transacting deals, working with clients and working with partners. The difference you see is our investment in the partnerships to get the partners to be more self-sufficient, to give the partners the tools they need to try and close more of the deal or get further through the deal cycle on their own. And then really investing in joint initiatives we can have with our partners to create joint demand generation.

So it’s not a matter of shifting from a transactional point of view, from direct to indirect. We’ve been a channel-focused company in terms of the percentage of our revenue. We’re now injecting some more energy around it so that we can get that ecosystem of partners to grow with us. It’s all a give to get right? So they have to put some skin in the game. We have to put some skin in the game and our investments are all in the spirit of trying to get that mutual investment going on both sides so that we can get what I call is, our unfair share of the market.

Louis:    Ah, that’s a good goal to have. I saw in your annual report it said you have over 500 reseller partners. Is that?

Carmen:  Yeh, that’s accurate. We have more than that in terms of signed partners. I think like many companies, there’s a significant amount of business we do with a smaller percentage of those partners. And by the way, that’s another goal of ours is to go out to more of those 500-plus so that we get a lot of them that are maybe at our lower level partnering tier to move up by doing more business with us.

Louis:    In the consumer product space, the CPG, you have this kind of 80/20 — but you know it may be like 60/20 — where a small percentage of customers are a majority of revenue. But what they find is that the customers in that 20% cycle in and out from year to year and they may not be the same customers. I wonder if you see that in the channel that you have this small percentage of partners that generate the majority of revenue, but they may not be the same partners every year?

Carmen:  Yeh, it’s a great question. I think it’s probably less dynamic, if you will, than the consumer industry. We have a number, especially in the Americas, we have a number of large, what we call market builder partners, our top tier of partners, who have been there with us. We have distributors, a couple in the Americas who have been with us for many years. So we have large partners who have invested with us and we in them. So there’s not as much churn. It’s when you go to that next level of kind of the middle grade of partners. It is true, you know, they may have a big deal or two one year and then the next year they’re trying to build their pipeline. So we do have some more change out, so to speak of the partner names, but not really in the top tier of the partners. That’s, that’s pretty, pretty consistent.

Louis:    Okay, that makes sense. You know, there’s this talk of the shadow channel and non-selling partners, consultants and such that maybe making referrals. Do you see that as a significant part of your channel program?

Carmen:  Yeh. Another good question, Louis. I’m not just saying it. I mean because these are very insightful. I know full well about the shadow channel. I actually saw you had done a podcast with Jay McBain and I know Jay from Forrester. I’ve known him even before Forrester. And Jay talks a lot about the shadow channel and I agree with that whole concept. What I found in the 10 months I’ve been here at Commvault is it’s a little less prevalent in the data backup space because usually in an enterprise or a midsize company, the individuals who care about data backup are pretty well entrenched into the IT organization. The way we get impacted by the shadow channel is when we’re dealing with a company who maybe has organizations and lines of business where they’ve gone out and procured their own public cloud instances. But it’s usually the IT group, the technology people who come back to us and say, Hey Commvault, I need your help. I not only have all this on prem data, but now I have 25 instances on different clouds that my lines of businesses have gone out to procure and now I need to make sure I have a disaster recovery plan, which takes into account the fact that I have all this data on all these disparate platforms.

But the decision making for data backup is still staying pretty close to the IT, the backup administrators, you know it definitely goes up to the CIO. But I’m familiar with models where I’ve worked with companies in the public cloud domain, dev ops, application development. And that definitely has been impacted a lot more by the shadow channel, by lines of business going out on their own and swiping credit cards and procuring technology solutions that may not be consistent with what the CIO is really looking to do.

Louis:    So the cloud has produced a lot of opportunities. And as you were saying, you can have departments and independent players who are spinning up their own solutions and now it sounds like you’re dealing with the problem. One of the things you deal with at Commvault is the problem that that creates, which is everything is so decentralized. IT may not know where everything is or you may have a lot of redundancy and they still need to get their arms around everything.

Carmen:               Yes, yes, they need to get their arms around everything, and the way they do that is, really could be complicated if that enterprise or that company has gone with multiple point solutions. What we talk about is really the native integration with cloud providers directly into their storage tiers. And when you do that and there’s no cloud infrastructure required, you can really leverage data for future use in those native formats. So you’re less dependent upon which platform it’s on. And that gives us a lot of flexibility. So again, we have smart native integration with cloud technology that really helps us help clients and help partners help clients manage across all those different platforms.

And what’s important is not only are there different platforms, but the velocity of change is increasing. So it used to be back in the technology world, let’s say you are a partner and you resold servers, maybe every quarter or twice a year there might be a new release you had to train your people on so that you can make sure you could represent that vendor’s server in the marketplace. Well, fast forward to where we’re at now, especially with public cloud, between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. I mean there are probably multiple releases coming out every week or every day.

So as that velocity increases and that change happens, we’re finding that customers more and more rely on us to help them understand how that change impacts them and to help us make sure their data’s protected, their data’s managed, and again, they’re able to recover that data if in fact there’s a problem or a disaster.

Louis:    Yeh, it’s an incredibly dynamic tech world. Let’s get back to the partner program. You talk about Partner First at Commvault. What does that mean for you?

Carmen:               Yeh, it’s, what it means is everything we do — when you have basically all of your revenue just about flowing through partners — everything we do needs to be partner first. So when we’re thinking of a new product, we’re thinking of a new feature, if we’re thinking of a new way to support a customer, as we roll out sales enablement tools, not only do we do that for our internal resources, but we’re in parallel we’re thinking about how can we also do all of those same things for our partners. So call it ‘partner central’, ‘center partner-driven’, ‘partner first’. That is what it’s all about. And the company continues to make investments as recent as two weeks ago when we rolled out our new partner program where we’re putting our partners front and center by making sure that we’re listening to them and we’re making sure that we’re making the changes in our program, and in everything else we do, so that we become easier to do business with and that we can drive more business faster with our partners.

Louis:    So the new partner advantage program, I guess one component of that sounds like it was major new financial incentives that partners could make potentially one and a half to two times as much in revenue as they were maybe making before?

Carmen:               Yes, that’s correct, Louis. So what we’ve done is we surveyed our partners, we hired a third party to do benchmarking on what our competitors are doing in and around data management and data backup partner programs. And what we heard were three key themes. Number one, we heard that partners were looking for us to increase our financial attractiveness, increase our financial incentives. They were asking us to reduce complexity. And so those are two things we’re tackling. And they’ve also asked for an easier way to get access to these co-marketing funds. So we’re doing a number of those things in our new program. And from a financial incentive standpoint, we’ve added a new logo rebate or a new customer rebate whereas partners bring us business, that are new customers for Commvault, we’ve introduced a brand new rebate that’s very lucrative for the partners. That’s one element. There are three elements.

The second element is we’ve added a new year-end bonus rebate. So when partners reach or exceed their annual quota, if you will, with Commvault, then we pay them a year-end bonus and also an accelerator. And we’re doing this so that partners don’t just see us as transactional, but they sign up to a year-long plan with us. They execute against the plan with us and when they overachieve there’s financial rewards. And then the third element isn’t new. It’s just an increased and enhanced feature of our program. And that’s around business development funds. We’ve increased the business development fund percentages and we’ve also made it easier for partners to look at their business development fund or BDF wallet to know what they’ve earned, what they’ve spent, what’s been approved. So those are some of the things we’re doing in and around the financial attractiveness of our program.

Louis:    Those sound all very compelling and appealing to partners. What about that second point you made about reducing complexity? Is that about automation? Is that about having the technology that they can easily register opportunities, register sales, record new deals, etcetera? Or what’s involved in reducing complexity?

Carmen:  Yes. You nailed it. Right. So it’s about making it easier on the front end to register deals. It’s adding, and this is where I talked earlier about last year we stripped out some complexity. So in order to quote it was very complex. We took some complexity out. What we’re doing now is what I call adding simplicity. So not only on the deal registration but in the area of sales enablement, sales tools, we’ve introduced easy to follow, easy to read sales plays. So if a partner’s working in a hybrid cloud environment, they can go to our cloud sales play and know how to position us, know how to leverage customer reference wins that we have. They’ll be able to get third party benchmarking information in and around cloud. And that’s done in a sales play as opposed to a volume of product sheets that they had to go fish around and try to find the right sheet for the right customer for the right application. We’ve made it easier for them to do that.

And then the other area of simplicity, you kind of hit on it as well, is we’ve redone our portal and we’ve made it easier to navigate. We’ve taken out a lot of content that was not as relevant as it once was. So we’ve streamlined it. And that’s being met with positive reviews from our partners as well, so it’s making it easier to do business with or as I call it, taking complexity out. It’s not just the financial incentives. In parallel we took those actions to make it easier to do business with us.

Louis:    Your role is primarily focused on partner enablement. What do you see as the most important components of that?

Carmen:  There are a number of things, so when we think of partner enablement and we think of growing a partner business, it’s about having our solutions positioned in a way where a partner can digest the information and understand how the partner can make more money and be more relevant with their clients by working with Commvault. That’s a lot different than a software datasheet. Partner enablement is front and center to what we’re doing. And of course the partner program is front and center because we needed to make it a little more financially attractive. And then the other piece is sales enablement of our internal resources, making sure we’re doing that in a way that’s consistent with what we’re doing with partners. So that when they meet in the field and they’re doing business together in the field, the partner’s enabled in a very similar manner as our internal resources aren’t able.

Louis:    So is it, you know, a lot of emphasis on training or the creation of content or you’ve talked about your portal and some of the tools to make working together easier. Is demand generation part of partner enablement?

Carmen:               Yes. Yeh. So good point. So working closely with our marketing organization and our demand generation hubs that are in each of the three theaters is very important. We have programs in place where we will run campaigns and when the leads come in we’ll figure out which partners to drive those leads to. And so that’s the demand gen is a big part of it.

And the other part of that is you mentioned content. So we’ve brought in some folks here in January and February to help us tweak our content so that it’s easier to absorb by our partners because it’s positioned to them in a partner voice, not a product voice. So here’s a data solution we have. Here’s why it’s important. If you’re a Cisco reseller or if you’re reselling HPE, we can talk about how we integrate with HPE, how our Commvault plus HPE solution means more to that partner. And that took some work to take our content and customize it for each of those scenarios. And again, when our partners read it, we want them to think, Wow, this content from Commvault looks like it was written specifically for me, the partner. In the past, and with other companies, you’ll have product information that’s more customer-facing. And it’s not as easy as just scratching out customer, putting partner in, to try and be a little funny, right. It’s all about, as I say, Louis, all of the customer-related content is really based on value propositions; with partners we’re focused on business propositions. So the content we give the partner, how is it giving them a business proposition, so they know if they do that initiative solution with us that they’re going to make money and it’s going to help them grow their business. So the content piece, we’ve spent a lot of time on. The demand gen piece as you mentioned, the program piece as I’ve already mentioned and then all the training, not just of internal resources. And by the way, with the partners it’s not just training their business people and salespeople, it’s training their technical communities as well.

Louis:    So you’re basically doing co-branded content it sounds for some of your major partners?

Carmen:  The short answer is yes. We also have a partner demand center that our partners have access to that allows them to take our content, it allows them to co-brand it. And it even allows them to upload their own prospect lists or customer lists so they can generate emails from that platform. So yes we do. That’s very important for us and we’re doing that. And when you look at the alliance partners, it’s kind of the next level. Where we’ll do co-marketing or co-branded solution material with Cisco, HP, NetApp, Hitachi, so that their ecosystems of resellers will have access to it in a way where they see Commvault not just as Commvault, but Commvault and the alliance partner and there’s a lot more value in doing it that way.

Louis:    You’ve been talking about these major partners like HPE, which are huge. What size are some of the midsize or smaller partners that you’re working with? What size companies or shops are we talking about?

Carmen:  So when I mentioned HPE, Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi, we consider those technology alliance partners. So we work with them. They can resell, Commvault we are on just about all of their price books. But I put them in a different category, a technology or OEM alliance partnership. From a pure reseller perspective, we have top partners who you would imagine companies like SHI and CDW and Serious. So these are billion or multibillion-dollar companies that we’re a part of in their partner ecosystem. I would say the next level down are kind of the mid-size solution providers are VARs, if you want to call them that. These could be companies that are 50 million, 100 million in revenue or more. Many of those are focused on a certain geography or a certain vertical. Some of our partners who do a lot of business with us are 20-30 person companies who just happened to specialize on data backup and they’ve standardized on Commvault. And we’re doing a lot of business with some smaller partners like that who are kind of punching above their weight levels so to speak, to use a boxing term. But it varies.

Louis:    So it sounds like you need a lot of flexibility with a range of partners like that to be able to service where they are and what they need. You know, I guess a question I often ask is: Do you see a marketing skills gap between Commvault and some of those smaller and mid-size partners? Probably the big partners have marketing well in hand as Commvault does. But maybe those 30 person shops or smaller and midsize companies, do you see a marketing skills gap there?

Carmen:  Yeh, it’s an insightful question. I don’t really see a big gap there. I think it’s a good question and because it may be intuitive for you to think that way. But I think with a lot of our smaller partners, they’re so good at what they do in their space that they got the marketing down, they have the messaging down, they just need a technology partner like Commvault to help them deliver. For that reason, I don’t see a big gap. The other reason I don’t see a big gap is I think we do provide a lot of material to all of our partners for them to get access to, for them to co-brand if that’s what they’d like to do. Again, I mentioned the partner demand center, so I think we have a lot of tools in place. In all the surveying I’ve done and we’ve done a lot of surveying over the past six months, that’s not coming back as a gap. It was more of the things I talked about earlier. So no, I’m not seeing that as a gap right now.

Louis:    Okay. Interesting. Yeh, I get a very wide range of answers to that. Some channel people definitely see that and others based on partner size and then you know, you’re really not seeing it at all. It sounds like your partners have a pretty good handle on how they’ve differentiated themselves and really focused on a particular market.

Carmen:  Yes. Yes. Correct.

Louis:    So do you think in terms of all these things that you’ve been changing and you’re less than a year at Commvault and it sounds like quite a lot, does the term “partner experience”, is that part of what’s in your mind? Is that something you’re thinking about?

Carmen:               Absolutely. We actually we’re calling our partner enablement and partner communications group Partner Experience.

Louis:    Ah, okay.

Carmen:               Yeh. We in a former company, I had a director of partner experience. The reason it’s so important is some companies focus on “partner sat”: partner satisfaction. And what I found is you can survey partners, they may be satisfied, when they need something they ask you and you give it to them, they’re satisfied. But it’s the partner experience that’s more relevant. Do they have a good experience? Do they have an experience first of all, or is it just the transaction? And then if they have an experience, is it a good one. And then are they looking to continue that experience? So the phrase we have here with our partners is, the reason we’re doing all this and investing is we want to work with partners so they can win, win again, then win some more. Because when you do that you create an experience where partners say, Wow, I really like this partnership. I’m winning deals, I’m becoming relevant. They’re easy to do business with. And so the word experience covers a wide gamut. But it’s definitely a word we use here and we’re very focused on it.

Louis:    So what Carmen should I have asked you about that I didn’t? What’s top of mind for you? What keeps you up at night?

Carmen:  I think one of the questions I expected is: we’re doing all of these things, why is it that I think partners should look at us differently than they look at some of our competitors. The way I address that is when you look at Commvault’s and it’s three areas, when you look at our products and our technology, you’re not going to get many people to debate the fact that we’re really good at what we do and we’re the best in the business when it comes to solutions and technology and products in this space. What we’ve added now are two other elements. We’ve added the enablement in a simplified manner, and we’ve now added the financial incentives. So in my opinion, any company that’s out there that’s looking for a partner in the data management, data backup space, we have a leading program because of those three elements. The products and technology, the enablement tools, and now the added financial incentives. So you’re going to see us be very bold in the market and positioning this and that’s where I go back to taking our unfair share of the market.

Louis:    Yeh. So you’ve made all these changes. What sort of analytics do you use to measure how you’re doing, how successful they are, or what kind of analytics do you use to determine how you need to continue to change them? What you got right or what you got wrong?

Carmen:  Yeh. Another good question. So the normal analytics are, of course, what revenue are we closing? What business are we closing with partners, what pipeline are we building with partners? But we also look at across the partners. How many partners are actually all in and how many partners are closing more than a certain number of deals in a quarter. So you know, we look at that to know if our programs and our training; in order to win, win again, and win some more, we have to have partners not doing one deal a year. We’re looking for partners to do multiple deals a quarter. So we’re tracking that and making sure that we can, not just get the revenue going in the right direction and up into the right, but also knowing that we have more partners closing more deals. We also, without giving away trade secrets Louis, we also look at the partner sellers on an individual name basis. Who are the individuals, who are the humans who are selling deals with us. And if a partner organization has a thousand sellers and we have three of them doing business with us, that’s an addressable market we need to go after. So you know, we don’t just look at the partner as a company, we look at the individuals. And we’re always looking to have more individuals exposed to what we do. Sharing success stories. Because you can grow business faster with a partner by leveraging what you have already as opposed to a vendor like us going out and recruiting 10 more partners. So those are some of the metrics we track.

Louis:    So it sounds like in those relationships, the channel managers are really key. The ways that they’re understanding what’s going on in the individual partners, and who are the sales reps, where the opportunities are to grow within the partnership?

Carmen:  Yeh. In Commvault we call them partner business managers. I mean a lot of people in the industry call them channel account managers. So that role is key, especially for some of the larger partners. We are also doing similar, we have similar roles with our distributors. So for the distributor managed partners, obviously the relationship with the distributor is key. And we also have all of our territory sales executives who need to retire their quotas working with partners. So those will be the folks who might be working with more of the smaller local partners where we may not have a national partner business manager on it. So it’s not just the partner business managers, but we’ve been training our field sellers on how to do business with partners, how to grow partnerships, how to leverage partners.

So that goes back to what you asked about how do you become more partner-centric or partner-driven. It’s not just the partner managers, it’s the sellers in the field. And it’s even the first level and second level sales leaders to make sure when they have their QBRs they’re asking the right questions. Not just how much software have you sold, but hey, who are your key partners? How are you building business with them, are you building pipe?

Louis:    Okay. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you two questions. I often ask when I’m hiring people, kind of a variation of these two questions. One is what’s a program that you’ve done — and it could be a Commvault or it could be at another company — what’s a program or a campaign that you’ve done in the channel space that you think was really successful that you’re really proud of?

Carmen:  Yeh. Wow. Good question. There are a few of them, so I’m trying to sort through and pick. I think the way I’m going to answer that question in six months is what we just launched on July 15^th. Because this is the most comprehensive and yet simple, simplest program change I’ve ever made. So I think we’re really going to see a big impact with this program. I’ve done other programs in the past where I’ve either merged, I was with Alcatel at Lucent when Alcatel and Lucent merged. So we did a lot in terms of new programs around that merged integrated partner program. Whereas you know there were two different companies with two different methodologies.

When we combined them and offered the best of both worlds from a program perspective, we really saw an uptick in the business as quickly as the next six to nine months. So I’m proud of that. And then the other one I’m really proud of is at Sungard, I went there to build a channel program. So we built it from the ground up. We actually hired the first few channel account managers. We took a company that was winning all of its new business, 95% of it direct, in five or six years we converted that to about 60, 70% of it was through channels. And that was from roughly 2009 to 2015. That was big in scale as well. We grew that to several hundred million dollars in business. So that’s just a smattering of a few examples.

Louis:    Okay. Yeh, that’s a huge change. So then the flip side of that question, which is what’s a campaign or a program that you did that didn’t work and why do you think it didn’t work?

Carmen:  Yeh. So in the beginning of my days, I’ll leave company names out. But I was with a service provider who was, you know, 95% direct. And we rolled out a few programs with some large partners and in six months to nine months, we knew it wasn’t really working, we weren’t getting traction. And what we realized is we were focused on the solutions, the value of the solutions. But what we didn’t take into account enough was the compensation structure for the service provider salespeople and the partner salespeople. So we made some tweaks so that we aligned the two comp plans, and in the next six months we saw a significant shift.

So what I tell my folks when they’re building a partnership — especially with a new partner, but even with existing partners — is make sure you understand how your partner’s reps are paid. If it’s on gross margin, then when you do a deal with them, it could be the best deal in the world, but if it doesn’t increase their gross margin, then they’re not really getting paid more. On the flip side, I’ve done deals with referral agents where we’ve paid referral fees and then the partner says, Wow, that’s 100% gross margin. I get paid more, I get accelerators. And then all of a sudden you have people asking how the partner is selling so much of your stuff. And it usually gets down to, you know, a sales commission plan.

Louis:    Okay. Those are very helpful. So if someone wanted to get in touch with you to talk about the Commvault partner program or anything else, how can people contact you?

Carmen:  They can find me at csorice at commvault.com that’s my email. And I’m also all over LinkedIn and Twitter. If they feel more comfortable sending me messages on those social media platforms, I welcome that as well.

Louis:    All right, terrific. And we’ll put links in for those in the show notes for the episode on the revenueassociates.biz website. So thank you for joining us today, Carmen. As I do with all guests, I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation.

Carmen:               All right, Louis, thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thanks for the insightful questions.

Louis:    And thanks to your communications team for reaching out and arranging for you to be on the podcast.

So if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or another app, and you found the podcast interesting and useful, please leave a review. That will help other people learn about the podcast too. Thank you for listening to the Software Channel Partner Podcast, and please subscribe and listen to future episodes.