Transcript

Dina Moscowitz:               But there is really no other solution we’ve come across except for manual research, that helps a channel team to very quickly and rapidly and quantitatively look at who their ideal partners of the future are. And then to hone in and find them so that you can begin your recruitment much more quickly.

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 the channel partners market better and grow faster. Today I’m talking with Dina Moscowitz, founder and CEO of SaaSMAX. Among her many awards Dina has been recognized by CRN as one of the top woman in the channel, is a recipient of the 2017 Cloud Girls Trailblazer award, and serves on the CompTIA Business Application Advisory Council. Her company SaaSMAX is a born in the cloud firm that won a 2017 Gartner Cool-vendor in SaaS recognition. Dina, welcome to the podcast.

Dina:      Thank you. Hello.

Louis:    So at SaaSMAX you’re kind of cheeky with things like your wiseSaaS blog and wiseSaaS Plan. What’s your culture there?

Dina:      It’s kind of SaaSy (laughs). You know, in the world of I guess digital transformation and millennial and whatnot, things are very personalized between businesses and their customers. And while we’re a B2B company, we’ve been really using that kind of culture and language to relate better to the world of SaaS and the emerging growth sector called SaaS. Because that, it’s a younger generation of emerging technology that’s been coming through.

Louis:    Well, you definitely see it in Europe, but seeing it more and more in the US also where people are using language or talking in a way that in the business world wouldn’t have been acceptable 20 years ago. But it’s becoming very commonplace now. Please fill us in a bit about your career path. What brought you to founding SaaSMAX? That’s been about six years now?

Dina:      Yeah, six or seven years. What brought me to the moment of SaaSMAX, which was also the same moment as I, we also came up with a parallel term, wiseSaaS, because you’ve mentioned that. Was that there is this emerging world of software technology that is across many types of domains, that is needing to get to market. And prior to my founding SaaSMAX I had a data storage SaaS solution built on Amazon Web Services that was called Home Data Guard and part of a company called Critical Digital Data. And it was real easy for me to see in reflection after I sold that company that there was a big chasm or we call it SaaSm between playing to —

Louis:    There you go again —

Dina:      That’s right. Trying to help and guiding SaaS companies who are trying to get to market beyond Silicon Valley to meet the right partners and leverage what’s called the channel, the IT channel, to drive business in new markets to new customers that they wouldn’t normally be able to touch directly.

And on the flip side, the sector called the channel, which many of us who are listeners already know about the channel. But yet so many of our friends and family outside of our world don’t know that the channel exists. Well, the channel didn’t really know about the emerging SaaS world. They knew about a few big companies, but they didn’t have a chance or an opportunity or the access to figure out which SaaS vendors, which solutions are coming to market that can be really exciting for them to bring to their clients. So that was where the concept of SaaSMAX was born. There was a marketplace that could facilitate and bridge the gap and make introductions between SaaS vendors and the channel.

Louis:    So kind of a distributor or a master agent?

Dina:      Yeah, we’ve been an online marketplace. We morphed into what I’d call more of a distributor two-tier model, right. Where we have vendors actually pay us to get introductions to partners and when the partners do sign up with partner programs, there are commissions that are generated. And from there what’s so interesting is we further morphed into a channel data as a service company. Because what happened was we started to have to become experts in finding and pinpointing the right type of reseller partner for a SaaS product. You can’t expect a VAR or a managed service provider focused on backup disaster recovery to be able to sell a martech solution or a social media solution or even a HR tech solution, and vice versa. You can’t expect a martech agency to be able to know how to sell a cybersecurity solution.

And so we realized that in order for our business to grow in scale, we really had to figure out how to profile all the partners out there so that we would know which ones are the right ones to match with the right vendor. And from there it developed into a proprietary technology that we now manifest as a solution called Partner Optimizer that does automated partner discovery very quickly. And it also provides insights about a vendor’s channel so that we can better hone in on what successful partners are doing so that we can use that detail to find more of the right partners for that vendor.

Louis:    So partner recruitment sounds like a central focus of your service — identifying and matching the right partners with the right company?

Dina:      Yes, exactly. And most of the channel has not had resources to focus on discovery and then recruitment. Recruitment is really more successful if you know who the right partners are that you want to recruit. And so we actually go back toward that step of, How do you pinpoint who the right ones are? So that you can put your resources, your recruiting resources, and your activation resources toward the partner companies that make the most sense to be your partners.

Louis:    Now I, from the guests that I’ve had on the podcast, I’ve been hearing a different problem that they sometimes have, which is that they have lots of partners but the transition from on-premise to SaaS is a challenge for the partners. And because so many vendors are making that transition and it’s a different business model, it’s a different revenue stream, partners have to now sell subscriptions instead of just a onetime sale. They’re going to make the most of their money from ongoing services value-added and not just from the commission. Are you working with vendors at all on that whole basket of challenges?

Dina:      It’s kind of the answer to that is yes, but that’s a loaded question because those kinds of challenges are typically found among large enterprise technology companies who, you’re right, have been selling a hardware or a software that was on premise that now is being migrated to the cloud. As a born in the cloud distributor, as SaaSMAX started out, our initial focus was on helping emerging new SaaS companies to build channel partner programs and find the right channel partners who have the right customers for them.

And so our approach, we do work with enterprise companies now as well, and in fact we do some mapping to help enterprise companies understand which of their partners are the right partners. Based upon profiling and assessment of those partners as well as to look at are those partners actually growing their sales of that vendor’s products or not, and why may or may not that be. And that comes down again to assessment and profiling of who that partner is and is it the right partner of the future for them.

So they may want to make a partner who was historically doing very well with them in their older products to be successful with their newer products. But it could be that those partners are no longer aligned and need to be switched out to finding the partners who can.

Louis:    Yeh, definitely, some companies are having to do that. So a lot of the vendors, a lot of the SaaS companies that you’re working with are startups and smaller ones that are really just getting their channel program ramped up?

Dina:      You know it’s a combination. I would say that our focus is more so on what I’d call growth stage companies and enterprise companies that are, that have software that they are rolling out and growing their channel partners with. So they’re very concerned about partner discovery, both based upon activating their existing partners, but then also finding more of the right new partners. For example, we have a heavy focus in the cybersecurity sector. A lot of our vendors that are our customers are either enterprise or growth-stage cybersecurity companies who are looking for the right security advisors or consultants or managed security, MSSPs, or security advisors — however they call themselves — who would be the right ones to add that product into their catalog or their stack.

And so we’ve really been able to hone in on who all those partners are out there and which ones may have a focus on manufacturing versus healthcare versus professional services, as well as which ones are focused on ecommerce versus device-based. And there’s different types of specializations even within a category like cybersecurity. And so we’re able to help really hone in and figure out with that vendor who those partners are that you would consider your Glengarry reseller prospects right.

Louis:    I understand your Partner Optimizer has over 120,000 potential partners in it now?

Dina:      That’s right. It exceeds that right now and it’s continuing to grow. And it’s that on the backside we are continually identifying new partners, global partners. We are finding partners who go beyond IT and beyond cybersecurity. So we’re expecting to really increase the database of partners three- or four-fold over the next two to three years ahead because there’s different types of partners that match up with different types of both IT SaaS solutions and business SaaS solutions.

Louis:    So are you crawling the internet to identify these?

Dina:      Yeh, in a nutshell we are. We’re doing multiple things, we do incorporate artificial intelligence. We do incorporate looking at partners from whether it’s from, you know, traditional ways like conferences and partner locators. A lot of it is through the web. And what we do really well is once we identify the URLs of a partner, we then crawl those partner’s websites to pull up neutral information about them and how they promote themselves to their end customer.

And so we collect billions of data points and we structure those from an unstructured format into structured columns and structured sets of information such as solutions and specializations, cybersecurity solutions, martech solutions that they mention, product types, vendor names, and product names that they mention. Target markets and customer sizes and customer types, and you name it. We cut and slice and dice in order to really hone in to get to the essence of what each partner is, including what they call themselves.

So what’s always interesting is a vendor might call their partners partner, or they may call them reseller, or they may call them a VAR. But when those same companies, those partner companies are speaking to the world about who they are and what they do, they rarely use the term partner or reseller or VAR, etcetera. And so we also help the vendor understand who those partners think they are and how they identify and communicate about themselves to the world.

Louis:    One of my recent guests, a recent episode that we launched, I was interviewing a partner to understand from the partner’s point of view what makes a great channel program. And he was always talking about their partners and he was talking about onboarding vendors. And he was using much of the same language that a vendor would, but it was kind of flipped from the partner point of view.

So you’re kind of a data geek, I say respectfully?

Dina:      Right. That’s true.

Louis:    I don’t know of any other database like this. Is this a unique resource in the channel world, this database, the Partner Optimizer that you’re building?

Dina:      Yes. You know, we believe it is and we’re continuously adding new types of data to it, like technographics and firmographics. And there’s more and more types of data that we’re gaining access to as technology progresses. So it’s pretty exciting to be able to collect the kind of information that we do collect and we have not come across any other company, or solution, that is focused truly on profiling and identifying partners, channel partners. There’s a lot of databases and services that will focus either on contacts, right? Our premise is, let’s find the right companies, then we get you the fresh contact. But so there’s a lot that will focus on identifying contacts within a certain type of company. And there are a lot that focus on end-customer databases, right?

And that’s great if you’re a channel team that’s looking to help your resellers find customers, but there’s really no other solution we’ve come across, except for manual research, that helps a channel team to very quickly and rapidly and quantitatively look at who their ideal partners of the future are. And then to hone in and find them so that you can begin your recruitment much more quickly.

The other thing that’s pretty cool that it does, especially for companies that have 500 or more partners, is it allows us to look at which ones are active and which ones are inactive, and compare. So using the quantitative analysis that we do through our profiling of partners, we’re able to say, You know, these top 50 partners who you say are inactive actually look a lot like your most successful partners and you better start doing everything you can in your power to go activate them because they are the right ones for you.

And on the flip side, we can say, Well here are your bottom ones that you’re wasting a lot of time and resources on when they’re not even aligned with your future goals of partners. And then we can look holistically at your partner channel and say, Do you realize that when you only look at your active partners, you’re missing opportunities in this region or in this market, in this target, in this vertical or this sector? And we can help you find more partners to fill in the gaps of where you’re missing because you never had a holistic view before to understand what your partner landscape is and how to strengthen it.

Louis:    So that sounds tremendously valuable. You basically are doing predictive analytics around the partners.

Dina:      That’s right. That’s right. It’s a term that people love to use, but don’t always understand, but we do end up having predictive insights that can help you understand which partners are more likely to be most successful, and therefore how to spend your budgets more wisely. And it’s sort of like when you’re hitting a golf ball, right? If you tee off and your tee and your swing is perfect, you’re going to get way closer to the hole — not a hole in one — then if you’re not aligned and that if you don’t take into account all the different factors that could impact the ball going in the wrong trajectory. So our goal is by being predictive and being able to pinpoint partners in a quantitative way, you start off with a much better way to accelerate achieving your goals and your KPIs.

Louis:    Yeh. You know, some of the channel leaders I talked with, you’ve talked about ideal partner profiles. Some of the channel leaders that I’ve talked with say that they have many different profiles, not just one profile for their partners. Is that at all a challenge for you?

Dina:      No, it actually is excellent for us, because we appreciate that and it’s quite true. And that’s where we’re able to do that quantitative segmentation analysis to help them know which partners actually fit into which buckets. Sometimes they don’t realize that there are insights such as, Did you know 85% of your partners are actually Bitdefender partners? Or 60% of your partners are selling into healthcare. Or 25% of your partners are selling this type of cybersecurity vendor and this cybersecurity vendor, right? So being able to look at more insightful information and stacks and ways of looking at, you know, how you slice and dice your partners really helps you understand what those different buckets are of partners. And therefore how to then either target one group versus another or campaigns to go do that and recruit in a more calculated way.

Louis:    Okay. Now in the consumer world, many companies find that a small number of customers buy frequently every year. But they have a long tail of customers that may only buy occasionally or rarely, and they cycle in or out from year to year. But that long tail can make up a very large proportion or even a majority of sales. And some channel leaders have told me it’s similar for them. They have a subset of 10% or 20% of partners who reliably provide lots of deals every year, but they have a long tail of partners that they know some years won’t. An individual partner may not have any deals, but the next year they may have three deals, and that long tail can be a big part of their sales. Is there a danger of becoming so efficient that you lose out on some effectiveness?

Dina:      That’s such a good question. It really ends up depending upon the type of product, the sales cycle, the cost. There are so many independent factors when it comes to that question that I don’t know I could answer that in one cookie-cutter way. But it’s a really smart observation on your part that those are the cases. I do think that you, there are a lot of companies that a lot of channel teams talk about the 80/20 rule, right. Where 20% of your partners are doing 80% of your sales. And what I can tell you are two separate insights on that is (1) from our experience with many vendors already, including some of the very largest that you know of, as well as some of the growth stage ones, is that they typically do not have as many as 20% of their partner’s doing 80%. It’s usually a lot smaller number of them doing that much of the sales. And one of the important goals for a channel team should be getting more of the right partners in so that they can have a higher percentage of them doing more sales. Because that activation is one of the biggest weaknesses of channel teams and that’s where our focus needs to be.

The other piece from that is that when it comes to channel partner activation, if you start by being better aligned and knowing that that company is the right one versus the right individual in the company, you have a better chance of having a better trajectory with the partner.

This comes back to if you meet a partner at a conference and you shake hands and that’s great, and now you have a great relationship with him. If that guy moves to another company, he might bring you to that other company, but you might lose the relationship with the existing reseller partner. And the goal is to try to make sure you are really aligned with the company and don’t just have one contact at the company, but multiple ones so that you can maintain and activate those partner relationships for a longer period of time. Does that make sense?

Louis:    Yeh, it does. The first part of your answer was the ever true consultant, “it depends”. But the second part, you know what I hear from a lot of channel leaders also is how critically important — and I was hearing it from the partner on that episode, that recent episode — how critically important actually the channel managers are in that the channel managers create strong relationships and get past just a partner down to individual salespeople. And really knowing people throughout the partner organization and working with them to strengthen the relationship and build more business.

Dina:      Agreed. You know, it’s a two-way relationship and it does have to be pushed by the vendor side. And so many times the vendor doesn’t realize how important it is to nurture the relationships and to talk with the partners versus at the partners, right? And to get to know them, but to get to know them as a company not as well as the individual and it’s critical. And Louis, we talk about this, it also makes me realize there is so much movement of channel executives as well from company to company. And so when channel executives move, they don’t always do the best job of communicating to the old team when they leave, which partners are most important to them and how to stay in touch with them. And the nuances about those partner companies that allow those partner companies to remain successful with the old company.

Louis:    So you have a marketplace of SaaS applications?

Dina:      Yes.

Louis:    So this is a different part of your company than the Partner Optimizer. Why don’t you tell people about that and how that fits into everything that you’re doing?

Dina:      Yes, so the marketplace component actually is more of an enhanced feature now of the whole partner discovery side of things. It’s a venue, an online venue for vendors to be able to provide and promote their product to the channel. And really specifically talk about which partner programs are available to the channel. And information about their channel partner programs that may not ordinarily be available in any sort of public marketplace to an end buyer.

Louis:    It sounds like the way you started that out, that your Partner Optimizer and all your data around partners and the analytics that you can give them and the consulting to vendors, that that is becoming more and more the focus of the business?

Dina:      Yes. Over the last year or two, that’s what’s emerged. It’s been very interesting in that regard in that because finding the right partners is more important than just being found in a public marketplace. Our focus has been around that pinpointing and matching the right partners with the right vendors. The marketplace online is validating and supporting and providing information to our reseller partners in SaaSMAX and enabling them to do business through our platform with those vendors. And so it’s an important piece, but that enables resellers to discover the vendors.

Our approach with Partner Optimizer is that it’s the vendors that really are having to dedicate the time and resources to get in front of partners, right? And so we recommend our marketplace is one great source to do that. But there are other ways and places that they are also doing so in order to get the attention of partners. So our premise is first find, and you know, if you’re going to put your resources in one really critical place as you’re building your channel, it’s to start by discovering the right ones for your business. That’s the, our biggest epiphany I guess as we’ve grown SaaSMAX from day one to where we are today.

Louis:    Okay. So as you’re consulting with growth startup or growth stage SaaS companies, aside from the challenge of recruiting the right partners, what do you see as some of their biggest challenges in creating successful channel programs?

Dina:      You mean channel programs or products that do well in the channel?

Louis:    The channel programs is what I was thinking of, that when a startup or a growth stage company is really just starting their channel program and they’re very early on. They may have had some direct sales. They may have proven their software so they know that there is a market for it and they know how to sell it. But now they want to start recruiting dozens, hundreds, thousands of partners to sell it. What kind of challenges do they have in creating that channel program?

Dina:      They have many challenges. They’re not hard to overcome, but they require time and resources and a little bit of investment. So for example, first they need to decide on the type of partner program that’s going to be most satisfactory to the type of reseller partners that they want to acquire. And so by having an assessment upfront to determine who the ideal partners would be. And then maybe even doing some validation through interviews and surveys and focus groups to confirm that those would be the types of partners. You find, we always recommend, find some of those first and really understand it and then build a partner program that you know will accommodate and incentivize and engage them to optimize working with you.

There’s also the need for an online partner portal that gives you the ability to allow resellers to register with you and to register deals with you and to learn about your partner program and access data and collateral from you. We do have a partner portal in a box that is a very, it’s a brilliant WordPress portal that is very affordable and a onetime fee basically for us to help you set up a partner portal in less than a day’s time. And it comes with all sorts of templates to guide a vendor to put their partner portal together as well as their partner program. So that’s another component.

And then it’s really having the commitment from your team, from your C-suite, to invest in recruiting partners and activating those partners and staying in front of those partners. And as you know, from talking to so many channel chiefs, it’s not an overnight success type of program, it’s an investment. And if you invest the time, you will end up with a very successful partner program and some great partners who can accommodate a good portion of your revenues. But it does take time, commitment, and a steady set of goals and having the time to do it right.

Louis:    Yeah. And that’s something — that time commitment — especially if a company is new to the channel, they have to recognize that it’s not going to be an overnight success. And they don’t have a lot of brand awareness in the channel. And you know, they may be looking for good partners, but partners are looking for companies that are going to be around and they’re going to be a, you know, have a product that people are going to want. So it can take some time.

Louis:    Yes, yes. Well, it’s also that it’s a very noisy market out there. The good news is that because most of the partners are tech-savvy and are early adopters of technology themselves, they are innovated and excited about new and emerging products, we do find that. The bigger challenge is finding the, doing the things to get them aware of and to make the time to learn about your products. And then to be able to adjust and incorporate them into their catalog or line card because they are very busy. And to add one more product requires a lot of influence upon them to get them to do that.

Louis:    Yeh. So are there particular industries of SaaS software that you’re working in? There are so many dozens or hundreds of different types of SaaS software, are there some in particular that you’re focusing on?

Dina:      Yeh, we are primarily focused lately on what I would call cybersecurity, business productivity software apps, and retail and hospitality. Those are the three areas that seem to be a genuine sweet spot.

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

Dina:      Always continuing to improve and improve our solutions, especially around partner discovery. To improve the quality. To improve what we deliver to our vendors and be able to offer them more and more insights that drive, accelerate their time to close. So that’s genuinely as a data geek, right, those are the things that I really am stuck in the weeds with. And I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about. How do we add additional insight? How do we turn a set of insights into one big indicator? How do we help the vendors derive even more insights in a way that are super easy for them to understand and grasp, and be able to then build new marketing strategies around those. Geeky, but yeh.

Louis:    Yeh. No, that’s understandable given your business. So how can people contact you?

Dina:      That would be easy. You can always go to saasmax.com. And you can feel free to reach out to me directly at my email. Dina at saasmax.com. And I’m typically good at responding. Those are probably the two best ways, and I can always funnel you to the right people in my organization otherwise, or feel free to contact us through our website.

Louis:    Okay. Are you very active on social media? Are you on LinkedIn or Twitter?

Dina:      Yes, I’m on LinkedIn. SaaSMAX is on Twitter. We also have a company page on LinkedIn, so any of those are good as well.

Louis:    All right. We’ll put those into the program notes for this episode on the revenueassociates.biz website. So thank you for joining us today Dina.

Dina:      Thanks for having me Louis. It was great talking with you. And hopefully we pushed forth a good message for your viewers that they don’t, or listeners I guess, that they don’t normally hear about. Which is starting at the very beginning on the right path.

Louis:    Also, the amount of data you have and the way that you’re using data is kind of unique and not something that I’ve been hearing about before. So I think that’s been very interesting and valuable.

Dina:      Cool.

Louis:    So as I do with all guests, I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation. It’s been named One of the Best Marketing Plan Books of all time.

Dina:      Awesome.

Louis:    If you’re listening to this on Apple Podcast, 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.