Transcript

Chris Essex (introduction):   So everything we do is Partner First, even to the point where we’re taking our incoming leads and sales qualifying them and passing them to our partners. Obviously folks like that. But we’re also taking our direct customers where we are and we already have them. We are calling them, doing marketing to them and as we identify a new opportunity, we’re passing that customer to a partner.

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 grow faster.

Today I’m talking with Chris Essex, Senior Vice President for Global Sales at AppRiver, which was acquired by Zix earlier this year. Chris has held senior sales and channel positions at Websense and other companies and he was named to the CRN 100 People You Don’t Know But Should list. So after this podcast, hopefully you will know him. Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris:   Thanks for having me Louis. It’s great to be on.

Louis:   So you’re in Florida. It’s July 2nd when we’re talking. Things must be a heating up down there.

Chris:   It definitely is heating up. Where we are here in Pensacola, July 4th is a big event with the Blue Angels and everything else. So the next two weeks are pretty busy.

Louis:   Yeh. I mean I’m in Boston and it’s in the upper eighties here. So summer is here.

Chris:   Yeh, I found my wife in Boston or she found me, and I can’t remember who claims what. I did meet her there.

Louis:   Good. So you have good associations.

Chris:   You bet.

Louis:   So please tell me about your career path and what brought you to where you are today.

Chris:   Oh, wow. You know, it’s a funny thing: I moved to Boston, thought I wanted to be a lawyer. And my future wife, now wife of 25 years, had a chance to move to Tennessee to open up an aquarium to renovate the city and kind of was the flagship to help that organization. And I jumped into technology at that point. So really started enjoying that, that was in the mid-nineties. And since then really had a great opportunity to jump around and be in various technology roles. Going over to Websense in San Diego was fun. Managed North America and other regions for them. And it’s just been a great chance to see after Vista made the acquisition of Websense and moved to Austin, we moved there. And then we had the opportunity to be bought by Raytheon and through that process too the organization name change to Forcepoint.

Pretty healthy background in cybersecurity and those types of things. And it brought me to AppRiver today because my former CEO who, from Websense and then those buyouts, he got in the investment side and operating side at Marlin Equity, which purchased AppRiver in October of ’17. So it’s been fun to have a chance to be here. We had some rapid growth in a year and enabled us as a private equity-owned company to move in and be bought by Zix, a public company. So it’s fun to be home and to merge these two businesses together. Really experiencing some great growth and founded and structured by some really strong leadership that we have at the Zix organization, much less the foundational core of the great people we have here at AppRiver.

Louis:   So what interests you — you’re working in the channel — what interests you specifically about the channel? What do you like about that? What do you see that as an opportunity for?

Chris:   Great question. I actually left my pursuit of a law career because of a friend who was at a value-added reseller. So I thought I wanted to become certified, get technical background and then get into that side of the business, you know. The evolution of VARs to MSPs to solution buyers, who knows what the name’s going to be next, but they all do the same, great value they deliver to a company right.

And so as that evolution kind of kicked in for me I jumped around, and once I was in Websense, it was 100% sell through the channel. Even though we found our own opportunities to develop their own business, our partners fulfilled it and then help to provide solutions on top of that. And so coming here to AppRiver, the beauty was analyzing the business to decide what we needed to do. We had both a direct business, which was made of about 30% of the revenue and maybe probably 20% of the customers. And we really just had to analyze the organization, see what we needed to do. And you know, it built out the strategies that enabled us to grow pretty rapidly this last year as we focused on the channel, our partners, and building solutions and even our M&A being focused on things that could help our partners to grow.

So, for me, the excitement is helping other people grow and be successful, both internally, but you get to magnify that when you work with the channel, it’s kind of fun.

Louis:   Okay, great. Why don’t you tell people what AppRiver does?

Chris:   Oh, great question. AppRiver started about 17 years ago as a spam cloud filtering solution for the SMB. And over time developed pretty quickly into the ability to be pretty effective at stopping security threats that were coming through that channel. But also since they were already in the cloud and serving the SMB built out one of the largest hosted Exchange, secure hosted Exchange environments. So that developed as a relationship with Microsoft. And then as the CSP program came around, with Microsoft to resell the Office 365 solutions, AppRiver helped to pioneer that whole program and be able to deliver an indirect model, not just a direct model of reselling Office 365.

So we leveraged our partners and kind of helped ourselves to be in a position today that we started app adding compliance solutions, archiving encryption, working with third parties like Global Relay and an organization called DeliverySlip. But with the acquisition of Zix we’ve been able to take their evolution over the last three years, which has been moved to focusing on the channel, focusing on working to add to their value-added reseller business and MSP business model as well to sell through. And help us to not only them to sell in the enterprise but to sell in the mid-size businesses and small.

And so where we are today is we really have a strong organization blended together where we’re able to take this vision that Dave Wagner, the CEO who came on to Zix three years ago and is now helping to expand and deliver here. We’re the fulfillment of developing their MSP Channel. We’re the fulfillment of adding a large base of partners that work on a month by month basis. And the fulfillment of a platform that enables partners to provision product and deliver it without having to engage in a bunch of different levels of effort in order to have product for their customers.

But on the flip side, this brings intellectual property to compliment and expand what AppRiver was doing in the compliance space and lead with market, world-class products for health care, finance and otherwise when it comes to encryption and archiving. That brings some unique things in different pieces that the other solutions we have didn’t, but definitely serves our market very well. So it’s kind of great to be in this position and see how it’s coming together.

Louis:   So the expansion of the partner program with MSPs over the last year or two that’s been really focused on deeper penetration of the SMB market?

Chris:   Yep. Majority of the focus has been there. We have plenty of very large customers that have come through our partners. You know, what might just be argued as mid to small enterprise as you look at 6 to 10,000 seat companies. Obviously Zix serves much larger businesses, as well. So it’s a great complement to have them both.

But this kind of started in the first quarter of last year as we brought in analysis, really looking at the lifetime value of our customers, the cost of acquisition, the banding of our organization, who we were selling to. And we just found that both by serving our partners as well as being able to be very focused on helping them to bring solutions that they could bring to their customers, not just a product that they had a feature or function. It really enabled us to go to what we call Partner First. So that’s one of our core tenants. So everything we do is Partner First, even to the point where we’re taking our incoming leads and sales qualifying them and passing them to our partners. Obviously, folks like that.

But we’re also taking our direct customers where we are and we already have them. We are calling them, doing marketing to them, and as we identify a new opportunity, we’re passing that customer to a partner to be able to fulfill not only that, but be able to sell their other services into it as well. So those are some of the things that we’re doing to help expand kind of the model of working with our partners. But it’s really to help them focus on how to create revenue streams, not just how do I get more margin on a Microsoft product. I’s great, we love the relationship with Microsoft, have a very healthy one, and we’ll continue to develop that very, very much. But I think as we look at this, the margins are just higher in other spaces. And so to be able to bring a security platform to them that really helps enhance what they’re looking to achieve is helping them both from a money in their pocket, but also to expand practices where they can deliver solutions that would be beyond what AppRiver ever would provide. So it’s kind of fun.

Louis:   That’s interesting. You were saying that at WebSense you were 100% channel and at AppRiver you’re 70% channel, but you’re Partner First.

Chris:   Yep. So the channel business that we’ve had here has always been pretty healthy. And over the last, like you pointed out, I’ve only been here a year, a little bit over a year, the last two years AppRiver’s seen probably 70%, 75% of its new customers coming through the channel. So this last year, if you look at it now, we have about 64,000 customers. Of those, 12,000 are direct customers. The number I was talking about was more on the revenue, obviously we would keep the margin if we don’t give it up, right. But we have to support it. We have to take care of those people on first-tier support and all those kinds of things.

So the value in working with partners, we’ve seen us move up to now we’re much closer to an 80, I think it’s like 83% of our business now comes through the channel. As far as our new business acquisition is concerned that’s even higher, because we’re cross selling into that direct base and some of them are moving and some of them are not. So our new business is probably somewhere around 95% through the channel now.

Louis:   You’re headed towards getting very close to that 100%.

Chris:   Yep.

Louis:   I think Microsoft is something like 95% channel as well.

Chris:   You know, they have a good amount of customers that they have direct. And for us, if they have a partner that goes direct, that could potentially be a partner that does not buy Microsoft solutions from us, so we don’t have a revenue stream there. But they still will buy other solutions from us. They still, we sell our advanced email security, which is candidly one of the best anti-phishing anti-malware solutions on the market. And so enhanced by a great deal of extra technologies. And so it’s kind of fun, obviously I’m having a lot of fun because I keep saying that.

Louis:   That’s a good thing. So how many countries are you in? What’s your global footprint like?

Chris:   We are in pretty much everywhere, except for some of your I guess this is where our go-to market comes in really, right. We’re realigning that whole structure. We pretty much, we’re as it came, we would take advantage of it, and so was Zix internationally. However, last year AppRiver bought a company out of Canada in order for us to penetrate their relative to getting involved with Microsoft and we have our CSP certification and as an indirect reseller in Canada now. We also are getting data residency for our solutions so that we can meet the requirements of the Canadian partners and customers up there. But our focus overseas, AppRiver was originally out of Zurich and Spain. Some of that was transacting in Euros and otherwise tax things that were advantageous for us.

But really found in the last six, almost nine months now, we brought in a sales leader, his name is Paul Balkwell into Europe. He’s our regional vice president for EMEA now. And he has more than doubled the business in the last six months out of the UK, the majority of it. Benelux Nordics is a good region because it kind of just leads over from UK, Ireland area. But Switzerland has helped us to serve Germany and that’s one of our next best targets to expand to. So we’ll be going there. And the only others are kind of as they come. We just closed one customer through a partner in Russia, believe it or not, our cybersecurity solutions. So neat things will happen ad hoc, but we’re really going to focus, provide staffing to support to implementation teams to western Europe on the whole. We have some business in Australia and other places, Latin America, you know, but our real focus is going to be on Western Europe at this point.

Louis:   Are all the partners, do they have direct relationships with you or are you going through distributors also?

Chris:   Well, we pretty much are the distributor and manufacturer the product and the distributor of the Microsoft Solutions, both hosted Exchange as well as all the Office solutions, moving into Azure and looking at what we’re able to do. You know, we have, able to sell dynamics and the other business areas that they have. So it’s different capabilities and competencies that we’re building out.

But on the whole, our distributorships have been smaller and they were where we weren’t serving particular customers, like in Australia, we have some interest in that. Our relationship in Latin America was kind of on a distributor model. We have a few partners in some countries where they were distributors in the past, and we’re looking at if that’s the best model for them and us as we move forward. And some of it’s working out, we’ve been able to come to some relationships where that could be helpful, but it’s more of a niche thing as opposed to being able to go directly to a partner and help facilitate their growth.

Louis:   Yeh. So how many partners do you have now in your program?

Chris:   Well, we have 4,200 active partners that do transactions every month. We are an MRR driven basis. We still follow the, what we call Phenomenal Care here at AppRiver, which is our partners work with us without contracts. We don’t require one-year contracts, don’t require the customers to sign up. It’s an MRR driven business, so provides a lot of flexibility, but also a lot of trust between us and them. We believe that we’re going to deliver and if for any reason we don’t, then it’s not hard to get out.

It’s the same model that comes over from our Zix side of our business as well. If you look at the Zix Archiving, for example, they have the opportunity that we now have already built in the first 120 days of this acquisition. Zix acquired AppRiver on February 20th officially but in that same first 120 days, we were able to provision and sell their encryption solution through AppRiver. So we are all one company now, so Zix Encrypt through AppRiver. We purchased DeliverySlip, which was the other encryption solution we have, it meets other different needs.

The archiving solution itself has many great capabilities, but back to that model of providing solutions, the archiving for Zix Archive, there isn’t a cost for ingestion of the solution. So it really has a model if somebody wants in it’s not going to cost them. And if they want to take the data out it’s not going to cost them, there’s no export fees either. So there’s a great deal of benefit in the melding of these two businesses together into one, and how we have the same core philosophy of taking care of our customers and our partners.

Louis:   You’re basically saying you have to deliver value every day or it’s easy for someone to leave.

Chris:   Absolutely and it can be so sticky just cross selling. It’s important, right. If somebody has our security, we want them to have the Office product with us or hosted Exchange or archiving. Or the flip, right. You’re in a vertical and somebody has Office 365 and some of their people in the business have, let’s say E3 or EOP3 where you have data loss protection in there. Microsoft has a decent solution and that’s great. They also have encryption and we resell those things as well. But when it comes to somebody with a different license or they need to protect the entire business and they need to have relationships with the Department of Health and Human Services and these other things, the solutions from Zix enable us to provide data loss protection at the gateway level without having a solution that has it built into its own core competence.

So it’s neat that we’re able to deliver things like that. But the other thing on that vein real quickly, is we built in our tech support team and AppRiver, and this was last year, we saw this, something called our Office 365 security audit. Our tech team had built tools to facilitate checking a tenant to see if advanced technologies of Microsoft, which are great, and having them built-in, advanced auditing, MFA, password notification, just different things that you’d normally want to ensure were on. But it wasn’t relatively easy to get at or to remediate. So they built a tool that enables that with one click to turn on advanced auditing for everybody. Microsoft has picked up their scorecard and have got better at that. But we’ve built our intellectual property into it. So where there’s evidence of a compromise of malware or something else getting into the system, a business email compromise, where there might be forwarding rules with a delete rule or something of that nature, we’re also able to remediate that.

So security, we’re enabling our partners to create an environment that gives them a security practice in the cloud. So if they have an on-prem product, or solution that they’re delivering on-prem or doing, you know, penetration testing or whatever, they now can extend a security practice to the cloud. And so there’s a couple of other good benefits to that as well, but it’s enabled them to get new customers. It’s enabled them to have a revenue stream of doing audits that they charge to their current partners or just keep an ongoing running audit tool that we’ve built as an application to give them notifications on their tenants of any evidence of compromise.

Louis:   So I hear, you know, you’re working a lot more with MSPs now and I’ve heard from a lot of people, kind of a lot of upheaval in the MSP world. Rollups, founders retiring, a new generation of owners coming in and so forth. Are you experiencing that? What are you seeing about what’s happening among MSPs?

Chris:   Yeh, I think that’s fair assessment. There’s many new ones coming in that have followed the model, right, that we all see. I think, you know, you understand MSPs from a point of business that there’s the ones that really enjoy what they do and they’ve branched out and built their own business and they operate on referral and they’re happy with that, right. Their acceleration is built by the capacity that they want to fulfill in a certain region and that’s great. And then you have the second ones that are trying to figure out what they want to be when they fulfill themselves or mature to its fullness, right. They might be in their first five years and Do I want to target a vertical or something else.

And then the last group that is that conglomeration, right? There’s large partners buying up other partners. There’s things like Sharp, you know, services out there that is buying up MSPs. So you have it different in different markets. But definitely see this change is like we’ve seen with people coming from the VARS to the, you know, whatever they were at one time or titled, IT consultants and then VARS and then systems admins or whatever we wanted to call them at whatever time. I think really appreciating what an MSP and the difference in what they deliver and each one of those three models that I mentioned really still serve that particular customer. So there’s plenty of them out there.

Louis:   Well, it’s something else that people have mentioned on the podcast that surprised me is that some of the older MSPs, some of the ones that have been around longer, are just getting comfortable with SaaS, just getting comfortable with cloud. And that they come out of such of an on-premise sales world rather than a SaaS subscription world, that it’s kind of a thing for them to actually get up to speed and be comfortable with that.

Chris:   Yeh, that’s real fair. Two quick examples. One, you know, the DaRT-to-cloud model is what Microsoft likes to call it, right. Those that are on-prem and moving to the cloud and how do you do that. We had a very large partner and we have a couple of franchise partners that work with us, we really appreciate getting the chance to do so. But one of them is like how do you convert an on-premise solution to the cloud and help that customer to be cloud-ready? And there’s a whole practice there unto itself. How are we at AppRiver facilitating that? Part of that is that security audit alone that I told you about, right.

Some people are uncomfortable with their stuff being in the cloud. How can you help show them that it’s secure, and by having these tools and resources to do it, you know there’s customers too that sit here and go, okay, wait a second. All I hear about is Microsoft’s stuff being compromised. Well, Microsoft is building more and more security into their environment, right? So that’s great. But to have extra layers of protection like AppRiver does to put on top of that, that helps those partners to help their customers to move to the cloud. And this is the other unique one, I was with a partner in Toronto probably about a month ago. He’d been with AppRiver for 12 years, something like that. And he had his own hosted exchange business and they were making good money on that. But one of their business owners was there with us and he said, you know, one of the best moves we made was to move our full-hosted environment, get rid of data centers and move it into AppRiver’s as we could then focus on other things that enhanced that. We didn’t have to have people staffing data centers. You do that. You take care of all those things. And what he’s enjoyed over time is seeing how our security solutions are built out, how we’ve added encryption. He’s down there on, right there in the middle of the financial district in Toronto and he said, the neat thing is now my revenue is gone 10X, my staffing has not increased, but I’ve changed them from engineers to more salespeople. So I have more sales skilled engineering type roles as opposed to pure engineers supporting as admins. So it’s just been an evolution for some of those MSPs.

Louis:   You were saying you have 4,200 partners now. What’s the goal? What are you looking to have a year from now?

Chris:   That’s a really great question. When we came in as Marlin acquired the business and I came in shortly after, the original target that AppRiver had set for this year was add a thousand partners. We had about 3,700 transacting partners at the time. Candidly, our assessment of our partners and what we were doing to help them and to make sure they were taking advantage of all the solutions that we have. They loved this thing we call Phenomenal Care. If you call this office, someone picks up the phone. I go across the country doing executive briefings, kind of little seminars on who and what AppRiver’s becoming with our partners and new things we have, cybersecurity, intelligence, bringing other executives. And just time and time again, So what do you enjoy about what AppRiver is, because I needed to understand it. I’ve only been here a year, and they said, Dawn. I was like, What do you mean Dawn? And they said, She picks up the phone. She’s the one that answers the phone all the time. And then there’s Kathy and there’s Joan and there’s Sarah, there’s like, there’s this team of like five, and Janie, you know, there’s like five or six ladies that just pick up the phone, they’re always there. And it rolls over to other teams if it’s not with them.

So we have a place where you can pick up the phone, reach somebody, and if you can’t find who you want, they’ll find somebody else to find them. So this thing we call Phenomenal is something that our partners want to extend to other areas of their business. And it’s actually something Zix has enjoyed a very healthy NPS score and a very strong support business. I mean, they were running an NPS of about 40 right. In SaaS businesses that’s pretty darn good. In fact, that’s pretty astronomical.

Louis:   Net promoter score.

Chris:   Yeh. The net promoter score at 40.

Louis:   Yeh that’s good.

Chris:   Last one AppRiver did was 84.

Louis:   Wow.

Chris:   So to say the least, we’ve been honored, and I have been blessed to have a chance to come into this business and be in a place where support is just understood as reliable. You know, we’re not perfect. Mergers and acquisitions can bring some interesting times, but our business continues to grow, our results have already spoken for themselves to the street and I think we are going to continue to see those types of results as we move forward.

Louis:   So AppRiver created AppMailer. That is a tool to help as I understand it, to help MSPs with their marketing. And you won an award for that too. It sounds like a custom through-channel marketing automation tool. Can you tell us more about that, what it does and how it’s working out for you?

Chris:   Yeh, sure. AppMailer is a platform built into what we call Partner Power. AppRiver previously had our partner portal, which was really the access to our platform called Nautical that enables people to provision product, our customers to take advantage of supporting through the partners and controlling the management and flow of the business. But our partners can access this tool through Partner Power. And it is what you’re talking about. It is a resource. The Partner Power itself is a resource for training on compliance and regulatory industries, on solutions that they might need in security, different solutions AppRiver has to offer and all those things.

One of the components of it is AppMailer, and AppMailer is a platform as you talked about where they can white-label or co-brand if they want to, marketing materials that might be things that we have directly from Microsoft. So we can actually take a video for Microsoft, label and enable the partner to be able to label it with their logo and content upfront and at the end. And be able to distribute that out to their customer base or to their prospect base. Do the same with videos that we build and deliver and/or just simple content.

So AppRiver’s really moved to a model of what we kind of think of as create an offering, build a sales play, train our staff, and then train our partners, and then provide the enablement after the training. And then last measure, let’s see what we’re doing and how we’re being successful. And so that platform of AppMailer enables those partners that might not have a marketing team or might have a marketing team that just wants to add more resources and capabilities to be able to leverage it the way that they choose that is best depending on how that MSP operates.

Louis:   So did you develop AppMailer or was that something you bought from an existing TCMA vendor?

Chris:   Nope, that was a custom app build.

Louis:   Okay. So can I ask you why you had to do it custom? Did you not find out there what you needed or what was the thinking behind that?

Chris:   Well, I wish I was intelligent enough to know, but it was built before my time. I do know foundationally the intent was we wanted something pretty specific, right. And it’s same old philosophy, right, buy, build or absorb or whatever the philosophy is there. And we decided that the best thing for us was to build it. So we had it built and it’s worked out well. It’s evolved and we’re continuing to build on it actually. So right now we’re continuing to evolve the solution itself.

Louis:   So do you see, you mentioned about this as a tool for marketing. Do you see a marketing skills gap between AppRiver and your partners? Often the vendors that I talk with have great marketing, but many of their partners don’t. Do you see that as well?

Chris:   Yeh, I think, you know, some of our partners they’re, just as we pointed out earlier, right, in the MSP space, there are some that their expertise is being a security company, right, or being an engineering team. And so they don’t have particularly those. They might be outsourcing and have one person that comes in and does sales and marketing or you have the larger partners that have very robust solutions. So I don’t, you know, the gap between us and them is that we have internal marketing. We build these solutions not just to broadly distribute and for our partners to white label or co-brand. But just like with MDF funds, we have partners that… I’ll give you an example, we had one partner that wanted some help funding a cybersecurity analysis report and they were going to distribute it. So they did so. We helped fund it and they’ve got some great results back as far as content was concerned. But they distributed it in their normal fashion through emails. And in that results they got back with, you know, your 2 to 5% return, right? They asked what they could do to enhance that. They said we spent a lot of money, you guys spend a lot of money, can you push it out to other people, other partners, your customer base, something. And we said, well let’s do this. Let’s use our in house video team. Not only use our resources, but we’ll use our spokespeople and those kinds of things and promote the video. And we did so and it increased their return rate, if I recall correctly, and it’s not fair for me to give you the exact number, but somewhere up to 20% return. It’s the highest they’d ever had. And we charged them nothing. In fact, we gave them money for the analysis.

On a flip side story to that. We invested with Microsoft and put dollars together and there’s only three as I understand it, universities in the US that provide a doctorate in cybersecurity. And one of them we partnered with them and Microsoft and did a SMB cybersecurity threat index. And the content that comes back is some of the stuff that we’re white labeling in that AppMailer that they can provide that information now to their customers to help those people to see those that are in the same industry that are about the same size as you, their concerns about these things. And then the partner is able to say, I remediate that. I can help protect against that. Let me show you what we do. That’s where we’re not only funding specific things for partners, not only we’re providing resources and enablement, but we actually are going out on our own and doing that. We did that here in the US and we’re going to head over to Europe and do it again over there for them.

Louis:   That’s great. You know, aside from your portal and AppMailer, what other technologies are you using at AppRiver that you think are important for helping manage your partner program and making your partners succeed? Do you use a partner relationship management tool or other types of channel technology?

Chris:   Yeh, so a number of things. We have an integration with ConnectWise. We’re working on our auto task integration, so you know, making things easier to do billing with us and manager your environments. Not having to change completely what they’re currently doing are some areas that we’re really building out and we’ve got a new focus with Zix to help look at what are all the areas we need to enhance relative to those solutions.

We also, besides our partner portal called Nautical for provisioning the product, that also was built in order to protect the partner. Because some of our partners will give their end-user the ability to log into a Microsoft portal to add users or do something else. Typically if there’s a direct connection with Microsoft to do that portal and get access to it, then they can see all the other things that Microsoft has to buy and make purchases there. Then Microsoft’s billing that customer directly too.

Our portal enables that environment if you do give the customer as a partner access to do things in the Microsoft portal, it has to come through their partner portal. So the purchasing and everything is locked in to go through our partners. So that’s just another enhancement of that partner portal. But the thing I mentioned before, Partner Power where AppMailer resides, that is really that resource tool where we have now consolidated that and we just did it at the beginning of this year. All of our place, all of our tools and resources, so our knowledge base, our sales and enablement tools, the AppRiver, the training that we have that is available through that.

Our lead flow process operates through that Partner Power. So we identify a sales qualified lead — we don’t pass MQLs — we have a BDR team that makes them sales qualified. It goes to the particular regional channel manager and then they then assign it to a partner through that Partner Power. So another tool that is very powerful for them. There’s others things we call Supportal and the customer portal and different things with all these fancy names. But those are more tactical on a day-to-day basis.

But I think you have to look at where we’re going with people too. AppRiver has been very much a — people can count on us because they called, we picked up the phone — but also the person that took hold of that call was responsible for it. So our staff was in a mode of being responsive as opposed to proactive, and we’ve more than doubled the size of our channel team. We are now in a very fast growth mode. We have another 20 reqs that are open for the channel, and then our marketing teams actually hiring both product marketing managers to run our global team there. But as well, very targeted channel marketing managers who will work directly with our channel account managers to help present and educate and provide the resources to our partners. So it goes beyond the model of just having technologies available, but actual humans, again. Crazy I know, but actual humans back out doing stuff.

Louis:   You’ve got so many partners now it sounds like you have that great balance between technology and the human element. And as you were saying having that great support is really central to that. So let me ask you two questions that are variations of questions that I ask when I’m hiring someone. So first, what’s a channel program that you’ve done that you think was especially successful?

Chris:   Well you know what, I’ve found that just last year, what we call our executive briefings has probably been one of the most well-received kind of channel programs that we’ve had. There’s two things, we did not travel to see our partners in the past. And as we go visit partners, we find that most of their other ones don’t either. But we actually created channel teams, these channel account managers, they travel to the field and reside in the field one week of every month and see their partners in the field. It’s their job, so one-quarter of their time is to travel to be in the field. And so they are face-to-face meeting with them and having those events.

In addition, these executive briefings, it started as a, hey Marlin purchased AppRiver, what’s going on with AppRiver? I was kind of in this mode of, Well let’s go talk to some people and find out. So Atlanta is close to us out here out at Gulf Breeze so we’re like, Hey, let’s set it up there. Let’s invite in our partners and see what we can do. We’ll put a roadmap together. We’ll talk about this audit. We’ll show them our product set and we’ll have Joel, one of the founders of the business, come in and give his position on what’s going on with this organization. And I think between those executive briefings and our channel account managers and then there’s other partners that haven’t extended into particular regions or might not think they’re important because they do little with us, but they have an opportunity to do a lot.

We built out a whole inside channel account manager team too. They have an assigned account executive to work with them. And so I think more than anything else as far as the channel program is concerned is take this phenomenal thing of support and I pick up and someone will help me and actually let’s pick up and help them sell. Let’s pick up and help them grow. Let’s care about what they are doing on a day to day basis and make sure we reveal to them things that they might not been thinking about, but we can help them to create revenue.

Louis:   Okay. Obviously you’re doing quite a lot of things well, but let me ask the flip side of that. What’s something that you tried that wasn’t successful, that didn’t perform as well as you had hoped or expected and why do you think that was?

Chris:   Yeh, that’s a really good question. I screw up every day. So candidly, I’ve probably got a really long list. I’m not that intelligent. I do become smart by banging my head against the wall a lot. I think we’re still pushing through on that Partner Power platform, making sure that all of our partners know that we do not have complete penetration in our base of the offerings there. We’re doing some very beneficial things to help change that with hiring the channel marketing managers, hiring all of these other account executives and engineers to support it. Even like over in the UK, we have six, seven job openings over there right now. Canada’s expanding. So I think hiring fast enough of the right people, training them as we want to is going well. But we have to hire faster. And I think just as a partner program, if I look at it that way, I’d love for people to really be able to appreciate and understand the value as we build it out in Partner Power, because it’s not complete yet either.

If you look at it just is there a program that failed, I’d have to say I haven’t just seen a pure program that’s failed. You know, we’ve rolled out for our partners another one where for every seat of Microsoft Office 365 or for every seat of our advanced email security that they sell, if they’re in a growth mode and they’re working with us and we’re working with them and trying to help them grow their business, we give them $10 a seat. Ones that have gone to these different executive briefings up to $10,000. So they get a 30-day free trial, they get $10 a seat. This could be only like a $2 for the add-on email security solution. So they’re getting six, seven months free. And so there’s a lot of these little programs, that one took a couple of times to tweak and make it work. But I think when we smell something that looks good, we are more than willing to iterate and hear from our partners. It’s like our partner advisory council, we never had one, started one at the beginning of the year. We’ve already had two events and it’s helped to shape the direction of some of our M&A.

Louis:   Yeh. Well a lot of times it does take two or three times to get it right. I mean, that was back in the day, that was always what people said about Microsoft was, it was the third release that was great. You know, it was Windows 3.1 that changed the market. Right. Windows 1 and Windows 2 didn’t do anything but windows 3.1 you know, this is back in the 90s. But that changed everything and that there have been a number of their other programs that took a few releases, but finally got right and sticking to it makes a huge difference. What should I have asked you Chris that I didn’t? What keeps you up at night?

Chris:   Keeps me up at night. You know, this thing we call Phenomenal. I kept trying to figure out what it was because everyone told me what it was, you know, told me that it existed when I came here, you know, whenever it was 18 months ago, a little bit less than that. But I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew it was tangible after I’d been here three to six months. And a partner finally defined it for me, and he said it’s being reliable, honest and being accountable. Because I didn’t ask him what was phenomenal. I said, what’d you like about AppRiver? When I finally learned to ask that question, I really started understanding it.

So what keeps me up at night is that we continue to extend this and make sure that it is part of our lifeblood every day as we are evolving, as there’s M&A going on, as we’re purchasing more companies, we’ve already bought one. We’ve got more that in light of our board, in light of our organization and the success that Dave Wagner, Dave Rockvam and that team has put together at Zix over the last three years and continues with this one. I think what keeps me up is going how do we make sure and ensure that we’re continuing that, and what I tell you, I can’t admire more than anybody from Steve Irons who was sales leader over at Zix to Geoff Bibby and the rest. Russell who handles the support over there. And just the different teams I think you look at, they all not only appreciate what Zix had to offer as a secure, great environment and something that you could admire. But they want to know how to extend this Phenomenal that would go beyond what they already were doing very well. But how do we not only do it here, but how do we do it better as we merge two cultures and two organizations.

So I’d say that’s the thing that keeps me up is making sure that our partners don’t feel a challenge there. And I can’t say we’ve been perfect all the time, but it is something that is a core focus of our organization to make sure that everyone understands and appreciates that what they had in AppRiver before is just going to be magnified, and we’ll maintain what they appreciate in who we are.

Louis:   Well definitely merging two companies has a whole set of challenges, and scaling and growing at the pace that you’re growing has plenty of challenges too, I’m sure.

Chris:   It does.

Louis:   So the whole business world and the channel world are changing very rapidly. How do you keep up? Are there any particular podcasts or blogs or websites, events, other ways that you keep up with what’s going on in the industry?

Chris:   You know, as I had the blessing of meeting and connecting with you, it happens all the time, right? And many of them come to me. I definitely rely very heavily on the value of newsletters and things because timing of events, I’m like most folks, very busy. Traveling a lot and doing things. So being able to look at newsletters and things of that nature, whether it’s the value that we get from The Channel Company or CRN or otherwise. But you alluded to some things before too. There’s a number of great resources out there for marketing for MSPs, like Robin Robbins. She’s been a great resource for us and for our partners, and I think it goes on and I can give you a very healthy list.

Louis:   Yeh. Well if you do want to mention one or two more that would be great.

Chris:   So ChannelE2E. You know, we have great relationships there and what I’m able to see in their content on a day-to-day basis has helped me to be successful pretty much every day. I do take a great deal of advantage of reading a great deal, cultural things and we have some great initiatives and organizational drives here. So relying on solution selling. There’s an organization called SPI and they in particular have helped us on our sales methodology and being focused on helping solve partners issues, their business issues, which solves their customer’s business issues. And so those are some resources that we rely on heavily. So it was, it’s ‘The New Solution Selling’ is a book. They had a follow-up book called ‘The Collaborative Sale’ it was by Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan. They bring a great deal of value in us staying focused and creating one common language for our marketing sales and candidly our entire organization to operate from.

Louis:   All right, great. I’ll put those into the show notes for the podcast that will be at revenueassociates.biz. So thank you for joining us today, Chris. How can people contact you now that you’re, you know, so much better known? Someone may want to get in touch with you.

Chris:   And now that I’m not the unknown, that CRN pointed out before.

Louis:   Exactly, exactly.

Chris:   I walked into, it’s funny, I walked into the team over there and they’re a great group of people and I said, thank you, but I’m wondering if that was good or a backhanded slap. Which one was it from our last conversation? So I’m trying to check that one out. Very easy. AppRiver, you know, appriver.com is on the web. Zix website, zixcorp leads you to AppRiver as well as you dig through there. But it’s real easy: cessex at appriver.com. If anybody has any interest or anything, we have a phenomenal team of folks that can help and build this rapport and relationship. But I’m on the phone with every single day with customers on behalf of our partners and partners themselves. Every day I have the chance to talk to them. So it’s great to have that advantage and being able to be involved in it, even though it looks like a large scope of responsibility handling AppRiver sales globally as well as Zix internationally. So I have both responsibilities there.

Louis:   So thank you for joining us today, Chris. I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book as I do all guests in appreciation.

Chris:   Oh great. I appreciate that, that’ll be great.

Louis:   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.