Transcript

Janet Schijns:     Anybody who’s ever counted the channel out, and my gosh I’ve heard this story, I’m old enough to admit that I’ve heard the, ‘we’re not going to need the channel’ story so many times, right. I’ve heard this, you know, I’m going to, you know, nicely estimate six or seven times in the last 15 or 20 years — and every time they’ve been wrong.

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 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 Janet Schijns, CEO of the JS Group, whose clients have included IBM, Intel, Cisco, NVidia and Microsoft, as well as SMBs and startups. Janet has held senior executive positions at Motorola, Verizon and Home Depot. She was on the board of CompTIA for several years. And among her many industry awards, she is the 2019 Channel Partner’s Influencer of the Year. So congratulations Janet, and welcome to the podcast.

Janet:    Thanks so much and thanks for having me, Louis. Always great to talk to you and hear your insights as well.

Louis:    Before we get going too much, why don’t you fill us in a little bit more detail on your career path. As I mentioned, you’ve worked at some great companies and with some great companies. What brought you to your focus on the channel today?

Janet:    So, you know, it’s an interesting story and I’ll try and tell it quickly. But I went to school for finance and I was, in all intents and purposes, I was going to be a Euro bond trader. This was my desire and I did that for about three days and realized that that truly was not for me. And I segued and went to work for Nestle Cosmia L’Oreal. So in the L’Oreal room of Nestlé’s business.

And in that I discovered these wonderful companies — WebSphere for IBM was one of them — that were coming in that they were talking to us and it was not an IBM, it was their partner, they were talking to us about technology. And they frankly were the worst salespeople I’d ever met in my life. And so I pulled them aside and I helped them. And as part of that, they said, you should do this for a living. You know, you should help the vendor to help the partners for a living.

And I had little kids at the time and so I thought that sounded like a great idea. Started the company with my dad who we just lost about two weeks ago. So kind of a great time to mention him in a podcast and honor dad. And he started the company with me. Said let’s do it, it sounds fun, you know I’ll retire. He was older, right, he said, I’ll retire you do this, this’ll be great.

And did that for about a decade. And then as part of my work, I was working with Symbol Technologies when Motorola acquired them. And Symbol had some real problems in their channel and I was cleaning that up. And I caught the attention of the CEO, Greg Brown of Motorola, and he convinced me to sell the company and come on in. And then through that while we were working with Verizon, because obviously Verizon at the time didn’t have the iPhone, if you can remember those days when only AT&T had the iPhones, that was about 10 or 11 years ago.  And so they convinced Motorola to let me out of my long-term contract because they were such good friends and they wanted me to come in. And so I did a pretty sizable seven-year or so stint at Verizon running not only their products and being their CMO for Verizon Enterprise. But also no matter what rotation I took or what promotion I took, I always kept the channel. Because when I got there, the channel was pretty much in disarray and I decided to clean it up with the support of our senior leadership. And so was there for about seven years and realized that I truly wanted to go back to consulting.

But as you can imagine as an executive in Verizon my non-compete, you know, included everyone, including, you know, likely your next-door neighbor. And so I was able to find a way to very nicely leave with all the support in the world. We’re still very good friends doing some work with Verizon. And I went to Office Depot and was part of their drive to get change in the marketplace. And I did that purposely knowing I had a certain period of time that I had to live out my non-compete. They were great with any amount of time I could give. And so as soon as that was done, I went out back into my own, back to JS Group 2.0 I like to call it, and you know, history repeats itself.

So we’ve got about 20 people working here, you know several of them. And interestingly enough, this time my daughter joined me in the firm. So it’s a really cool kind of full circle family story there and we’re pretty excited about that. Just overall, and of course my husband’s been in the firm both times, so he gets honorable mention. So that’s just a little bit about me. That helps to lay out some of my experiences.

Louis:    Well, I’m sorry to hear about your father passing. It does sound like a very multi-generational company.

Janet:    It is and we all love the channel because, if you really look at the data, if you look at the World Trade Organization for example just said, 75% of the products are sold to any one of us on any given day are sold indirect now. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon has a huge stake in that. But the reality is the majority of products are sold through channel. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, this is a transferable skill: Selling your products through someone who does not manufacture your products but in fact sells or adds their value to them is the primary route to market. So it’s good that it’s a multigenerational thing because I think it’s a gift that keeps on giving for many generations to come.

Louis:    It is a huge part of the global economy. It’s always surprising to me it seems very under-supported or underrepresented when you look at content, when you look at channel technology vendors compared to a lot other parts of the business world and the marketing world, it’s surprising how little content or technology there is. But please tell people what you do at the JS Group?

Janet:    A couple of things here, and it’s interesting because I love that comment you made about being underrepresented, and I think that’s part of what we do here at JS Group. So when we look at our business, it’s really around three things. So the first is of course this concept of channel enablement. So how do we help the biggest, best, brightest, whether they’re existing or startup vendors, really understand how to enable channel. And by the way, not just focusing on indirect, but their full channel route to market. And how do we have the right program, design the right strategic design, what are their framework, their benefits, their requirements? So really looking at that and often in a lens of this new digital normal that we’re in and how do the channels evolve and change towards that.

The second thing we do is kind of go-to-market routes to market evolution. So once you’ve decided precisely what it is you need to do with your channel strategy, it never fails that then you have to re-evaluate who you’re going to market with. And so a lot of programs are there to help to evolve the go to market route to market.

And then finally we do a fair amount of sales and marketing enablement, but more on the digital side. So more for customers, vendors or partners who we’ve worked through what we call our MAP, Market Action Planning day. Our Market Action Planning days are kind of trademarked secret process that we do to figure out your strategic imperatives, and how as a larger partner or as a vendor you can make the best moves for yourself as well as in the case of the vendor for the channel. And then we have some clients who need help with some of that and we have some folks that do that. We also work with many sister firms, brother firms to get those services done as well. So that’s a quick rundown on what we do. Happy to go through any more of it as we go through Q and A.

Louis:    Yeh, that Market Action Planning day that sounds a lot like the Marketing Strategy Sprint that we do. This is a time of huge challenges for the channel as well as huge opportunities, especially in the tech channel with the cloud, AI, the internet things, 5G, Marc Andreessen’s famous ‘software is eating the world’ line. It seems like the whole world is racing towards software and tech and much of that is sold and serviced through the channel. So do you, is that a major part of the opportunity that you have at JS Group — working with software and tech companies?

Janet:    It sure is and everybody all of a sudden… Well first of all, every company in the world is now a tech company. It doesn’t matter if you’re making cars or butter. Everybody’s a tech company now. That’s just the way it is. That’s where the value is in a digital world. You know, then if you think about the vendors, even the most traditional hardcore hardware let’s call them vendors have now transitioned to flexible licenses, software, something as a service. The term “as a service”, perhaps the most used term right now in the channel, right everything as a service.

Louis:    Yeh I haven’t run into butter as a service yet?

Janet:    Oh butter as a service, yeah I can make that. But they’re definitely a technology.

Louis:    I think it could be coming.

Janet:    You know if you go to a Land O’Lakes event — which I actually keynoted a Land O’ Lakes event about two years ago — and if you go there and talk to their cooperative farmers, right they’re not growing their own stuff, they have a cooperative of farmers, they are more technologists than farmers. And so that’s where my comment of everybody’s a technology company now. It doesn’t matter who it is. And, oh by the way, if you’re a big restaurant chain or a big hotel or an airline, etcetera, all your food is now as a service because you’re all using technology and software to predict everything and right down to you know

Louis:    Yeh I absolutely agree it is a part of every industry now who wants to be successful.

Janet:    And the channel is part of every one of those industries. And then when you, you know, when you click the lever and go to the tech industry, software in this concept of everything is a service. Whether it’s the latest startup that one of the PEs have funded or whether it’s an existing, big, big, big firm, and you pick your area, whether it’s security, mobility, networking it doesn’t matter. Everything’s a service and everybody’s getting into software. And so a fair amount of our work is spent either with startup vendors who are saying, so PE that just gave us $65 million, said we’re going to need a channel. You know, we don’t really know what they mean by that. Or we went to an event and we met some channel partners, but we’re a little unclear on that. So we need a program and so on and so forth. Or it’s an existing large main vendor who says, Hey, our existing channel, this isn’t working. We launched products and what we see a lot now is we launched products that are software that are recurrent, that are licensed based, that don’t require the same contracts, the same vehicles as in the past. We noticed with great interest that our VARs all became MSPs, even though most of them really aren’t MSPs. They’re still VARs with some services, but they realized you can’t say you’re a VAR because if you are a VAR you’re like a Dodo bird. And so we’re trying to figure out how we get these folks to sell the stuff the way they used to sell hardware because our hardware numbers are tanking, and our software numbers are maybe not keeping up, at least not through the indirect channel. And so some of the conversations we have, and if you’ve talked to Jay McBain and I believe you have recently, he has a lot as well, is who, which channels will actually be successful. What does the channel look like to sell software and recurrent revenue?

And what we see a lot is that the traditional channel, obviously the VAR channel, you know, gasping for its last breathes with all my apologies because I love them all. And if you can’t do services, few and far between will be the successes and they will largely be online or call center platforms. And so we see a lot of that with the vendor coming and saying, I need to change my program. I need to change my requirements, I need to change my benefits. And oh, by the way, I think I might need to change my partners.

Now the top 15 or 20 partners hardly ever change those big global SIs that are kind of the big dogs in the industry. They continue to evolve, they continue to have those big enterprise clients and they find a way, right? Custom bespoke billing, et cetera. But it’s the long tail of the channel where the struggle is really taking off now, all these businesses who started on a concept, if they sold a $2 million deal or $1 million deal or $100,000 deal, they got their margin and that money went in and that’s how they ran their business. And now they’re selling a $1.80 license and it’s a little different because they’re going to get it every month or every quarter, or every year. And it’s just not the same. So I would say one of the largest conversations we’re having right now is who are the right partners, what skills will they have to have, and how do you as a vendor support them so they’re successful in a recurrent revenue world?

Louis:    Well, I’ve had some, you know most guests are leaders of channel programs and most of them and the companies that they’re at say that the channel still remains the most cost-effective way to get to the market. I have had a couple of guests, one in particular — Ian Moyes in the UK — who feels that the cloud is maybe making the tech channel unnecessary. That tech companies can go directly to their customers and especially after they’ve signed on once that the partners are not adding a lot of value. And that’s, I think, it’s just something that you’ve talked about a lot, which is that partners really have to have that value-added. That they have to have a service, that they’re not just reselling a license, but they’re getting most of the revenue from the services that they provide. And I think you’ve talked about how typical implementations are not from one vendor, but they typically are across a lot of vendors and that’s where the partner really can add value.

Janet:    Anybody who’s ever counted the channel out, and my gosh, I’ve heard this story, I’m old enough to admit that I’ve heard the, ‘we’re not going to need the channel’ story so many times, right? So many times it’s exhausting. So when we went from the desktop to the server, Oh, we won’t need a channel anymore. When we went from the PBX phone closet to, you know, unified communication, Oh, we won’t need a channel anymore. And so data centers to cloud from prem-based security to security licenses. I’ve heard this, you know, I’m going to, you know, nicely estimate six or seven in the last 15 or 20 years. And every time they’ve been wrong because what everyone seems to forget is the value the channel will always bring is that they are closer to the customer. And unless you sell a product that is seamlessly turnkey with a massive marketing budget and you can truly service people online, flip the key, no need to be anything, you will always need a channel of distribution.

Now that channel of distribution may very well change and I don’t even know that we can call all the changes that’ll happen in the next 15 or 20 years with AI and RPA. And all these other things coming when you know, every single person in America has their own robot: how does it change, how does the service model change? I don’t think we can call that. But we’ve never not had channel partners, which is where our work, looking with the channel, the vendors at what do they really need to do. And your work, some of the marketing workshops you do and driving partners and helping partners to really become good at marketing is because they’re closer to the customer. And so whenever I talk — you know Ian’s always a great rebel rouster to talk to, I love him. He’s so bright — whenever I talk to someone who makes that opinion, I always say there’ll be a channel. It’s just a matter of which channel will survive, right.

Because there used to be a, I always like to use examples, so there used to be a chain called Software City. And funnily enough, it was a store back in the early nineties that you would go in and buy software when software was in a box. And when software was something you loaded on your computer. And Software City then got into like, Oh heck we better do some PC sales and PC repairs and you know, and ultimately they went out of business. Funnily enough, if they were still around, they’d have the best name ever for this industry. But the reality is that model went away, not the model of somebody buying software and not the model of somebody buying software from a channel partner, just the model of buying software off a shelf in a box that you put in a floppy disc or a CD-ROM and load it onto your computer.

And so when the technology changes, the channel changes with it. The problem is many of the channel programs, many of the channel vendor folks have gotten a little stale and believe that just because they wave a magic wand and call it MSPs and make one or two little tiny changes to their program, that they’ll become relevant. And then they’re quite upset when a new contender comes in the market and the partner takes that contender into their portfolio. And they can’t understand why. We have a firewall, why would you take that other company’s firewall?

And it’s often because their channel approach, their automation, their ability for marketing, their marketing materials, the support they give them, something is better. And the vendor who thought they had the lion’s share and they were complaining about the partners, The partners, ugh. You know, the long tail of partners, ugh. You know, I bet you we should fire half of them. All of a sudden the partners they didn’t want to leave are in fact leaving. And so I think this, the vendors that are really looking at it, trying to figure out who this next generation of partners are and making sure that their programs are up to date are the ones that will survive. And that’s no different than saying the partners that invest in the right things in their business are the ones that will survive. And yet too often in our industry we talk about just the partner surviving as opposed to the vendors.

Louis:    Well you have sounded some alarm bells about the channel. A few months ago you wrote, “I have to find a way to make sure that the channel thrives because right now I think it’s on a survival path and that is not the channel. The channel has always been a thriving part of the tech industry, the tip of the spear.” And even Jay McBain says that he thinks that the channel will be declining a portion of tech sales over time. Do you think that this is because of vendors not keeping up, or because of partner’s aging out, or new business models or what’s going on?

Janet:    You know, it’s so many things. In fact, I just wrote a dear CFO letter on Brainyard talking about one of the things that’s going on, which is many companies are getting the wrong answer on if the channel is more expensive or direct is more expensive. And they’re typically getting it from their direct sales leader saying indirect is too expensive and we should plan to decline the channel. And so I think if I really look at it, it’s a bit of a starburst, right. So there’s some bad behavior on some vendors thinking that they don’t need to keep up, that somehow the channel will keep up for them.

And when they do try to keep up, they kind of shove new requirements or a new program elements into the channel with the belief that if they just put more stuff in the program and more benefits and invest money in new marketing whizz-bang stuff, things will get better. And we all know that’s not the truth. Half the partner program is never used by the partner and the key is knowing which half. And from a partner standpoint, we’ve got a very high level of demographic aging out. We’ve got new channels coming in. So I don’t know that the channel declines over time. I think new channels increase over time. Some of those new channels are marketplaces — amarketplace is a channel. These martech agencies that are doing the e-com web, digital, digital marketing, social media for enterprises all the way down to small businesses and quickly becoming a big voice in what technology the end customer uses. So those martech agencies I think come in hot and heavy.

And I believe you see a lot of pro services, whether it’s your CPA or your costs and moving you into as a service environment or whether it’s your lawyer taking a firm and hard opinion on your security. I think you’re going to see new entrants that shift the conversation. And all of this is being empowered not just by the technology change, but also the change in the buyer. If you look at the most recent data, 81% of all shopping journeys for B2B now start online. And we all know that partners need to step their game up online, which is why I’m saying marketplace is a channel have a good chance of disrupting the normal channel, particularly in SMB and consumer.

And then when you take another step and you say it used to be about 21% of the IT purchases were made by a business buyer, so non-IT. Now it’s way up over 50%; I’ve seen numbers from 51 to 65. And so the business buyer has someone different they’re going to talk to. If you’re the CMO and you want to talk about your CRM, and how you handle customer calls and how you think about that, you are not going to talk to the traditional VAR MSP agent SI, you’re going to talk to your martech agency and they’re going to have a pretty firm opinion.

So I think the channel either needs to get these relationships now as a referral source, potentially make some acquisitions of those, offer those services and really double down on digital to remain a viable alternative. And then the vendors at the same time need to stop with the over simple analysis, realize that the channel, because of the cost of lost opportunity is in fact the most cost efficacious way to go to market, and find a way to lower their cost of channel without hurting the indirect channel. And there’s many ways to do that. Taking margin from the partners is not the best way.

Louis:    Yeh, I mean it’s absolutely true what you’re saying about how most business purchases start online. They involve quite a lot of research, that 81% figure is great. I actually was consulting with a multibillion-dollar manufacturing company a year or two ago and was doing a workshop for some of their executives and going through a lot of the figures around the amount of search in their industry, the amount of social chatter, the amount of community, and so forth. And after an hour of this one of their senior executives said, I just don’t think our buyers are online. I was just amazed. It was like how much data do you need? But let me get back to something you mentioned briefly there. You did a study with 360insights last year that said that half of MDF spent on email, digital and telesales was wasted. Now I have a theory on why that might be, but why do you think that was?

Janet:    So, I think its two things. So one, despite the fact that the partners are closer to the customer, which is always been the reason to use them — we can say it’s technical expertise and of course that’s important — but their closeness to the customer, whether it’s vertical, geographic, you know relationship doesn’t matter. Their ability to get close to customer that the direct team couldn’t handle efficiently has always been their biggest claim to fame. And yet they’re just, with some few exceptions and to those people listening, I apologize, but with few exceptions, they’re really bad marketers. They’re not even, you can even say they’re not good. They’re actually bad marketers. So I think that’s number one is they are not good marketers. So if you are not a good marketer and you apply for market development funds, your chances of success are kind of low.

And two, I think many vendor MDF programs have not kept up with the times. And so partners are forced — I was just looking at an MDF program last night with a vendor and they’re forced into these buckets a– nd when they’re in these buckets, the only things they can do right are some of these email digital campaigns that aren’t digital and telesales in that category. And so they do it and they don’t do it well. I don’t know what do you think?

Louis:    Yeh, that’s exactly, I would say exactly that and it’s not their fault, but the vast majority of partners are just not very good at marketing. It’s not their background. Marketing has become very complicated and so as a result, they haven’t laid the proper foundation for marketing success before doing these MDF programs. That’s part of my Bullseye Marketing approach. And then if they only do these short-term campaigns and haven’t supported it or built a foundation with other types of marketing programs, long-term branding awareness programs also, those campaigns just aren’t going to be as successful as they could be.

Janet:    I agree. Even when they get a good lead, the follow up is a little difficult. And then the final thing I’ll push on when I push on digital, I have this conversation all the time with people. So everybody knows you’ve got to be active in digital, most primarily social media. And you’ll go and you’ll talk with partners and they’ll go and they’ll do a social media campaign. They’re very, very proud of themselves. They either hired an intern or an agency or a someone and they will post endless — and I call it shouting — they endlessly shout at people about their business. And as a result, that’s why the mute button is there online.

So as a result, they’re, you know, they’re in all affects just muted. No one hears them. And there’s an old saying that if you wink at someone in the dark, you’ll know what you’re doing, but no one else will. And so that’s a lot of how they end up, right, they’re just screaming from the rooftops about how great their company is. And then the MDF comes back and the vendor says, I don’t get it, we gave them all this good social content. You know, we worked with them. They did this whole social media thing. They were posting every day. And when I go and look at what they’re posting, it’s just endless promotion of their company.

And it’s not a reason that anyone would emotionally connect with them online. And when I have this conversation with senior leaders at partner firms, they’ll say things like, Yeh, I’m not doing social media. And every single time I will tell them, social media is about people connecting with people. Your brand can experience a lift from it which will then allow your brand to connect. But it starts with people. So if your top executives are not involved, no amount of money that you spend from a vendor is going to make you successful in that digital social media. And I always use as my example, John Legere from T-Mobile with slow cooker Sunday and Running with Crowds and everything else he’s done. He has become a social media persona that has risen T-Mobile’s believability. There’s a huge overlap in who follows him and who follows the company and has given them brand permission to be quirky and weird and the uncarrier. And that’s a great example of somebody who if you spent money with them in an MDF campaign I bet you they’d be able to be successful with it. But if you spend money with the guy who says, Yeh, I’m not doing social media, like I have an intern to do that and we post every day something about the company — they’re not going to be successful because that’s not what social media is about.

Louis:    Yeh. I’m going to disagree with you on this one.

Janet: Okay, let’s go.

Louis: Because I also listened to the webinar you did last week for Channel Partners and you were talking about social media and John Legere there too. And I really think that social media is a low priority, especially for the partners or it should be a low priority. I saw McKinsey said that email is 40 times more effective for customer acquisition than social media and that’s been my experience. I think social media can be a good way to engage with people, but it’s not a very good channel for business development. And there are lot of other programs that companies can be doing that will be much more effective for them in the social media space. Though paid social media can be great for targeting. You know, you can absolutely, you know, on LinkedIn you can target the right people. You can do remarketing, you can use your email list on Facebook or on Twitter or on other social media platforms.

And so that kind of targeting to reinforce your other messaging, your other marketing can be very effective. But just general social media, you know, your predecessor as Influencer of the Year, Rob Rae, who was actually the first guest I had on the podcast, he tweets like once a month. He’s hardly visible on social media at all. And I could give lots of other examples. I just don’t agree with you that that is where small and mid-sized companies should put their primary or a major part of their effort.

Janet:    So and I want to say this the most respectful way I can…

Louis:    [laughs] You may respectfully or disrespectfully disagree with me.

Janet:    So I can’t agree for a couple of reasons and I’ll tell you why. So the first one is, you know, we’re facing an area where 75% of the channel will be millennial. And so if as a business, we think the only reason we use social media is to try to get a new customer, then we’re really not understanding the culture graphics that are happening now with this next generation where, you know, demographics are all but dead. And culture graphics would indicate, gender’s fluid, age is just a number, and where you live has nothing to do with the culture that you believe in. And Netflix can prove that through all their work that they’ve done in foreign content and how well it plays domestically.

And the reason I say that is because I don’t think people get it. So I think if you’re looking at a partner and a partner’s saying, I need to get a sale tomorrow, then McKinsey’s emails 40 times more effective, you know, boo-yah good for them. But if you’re actually looking to engage with your community, your crowd, not only your employees but the influencers and customers over time, email is not effective. I delete every email I get and I would like to think in a culture graphics world I’m a bit of a digital native. And so the studies are pretty clear that social media has to be a priority because it is the new town crier, if you will. It is the new brand awareness. It’s a higher level hierarchy that your business has to have for credibility.

And I’d also tell you, I’ve got partners who are doing this right who are spending a lot less on marketing than many of their other competitors and a lot less on travel. And I’ll wrap it up with saying, Rob, who I love by the way, travels about three-quarters of the nights a year, he’s in a hotel. He and I scored a couple points apart on the influencer scale the first year Jay McBain did it. I did it with 41 nights. He did it with like 200 and some. So it also comes back to just how do you want to build your influence? Do you want to build your influence on the hardback of airline miles and sleeping away from your family? Or would you prefer to build your influence online?

And so I tell people, Listen, it’s part of your strategy. You can’t replace email marketing and physical events, et cetera with social media. It’s got to be AND strategy. But it is going to be critical to your brand moving forward and it’s where the conversations happen. Again, if you’re just shouting about your business, email’s going to be more effective. If you’re actually having a dialogue and a conversation and engaging people, then you can talk about your business occasionally, it will be more effective.

Louis:    Well, we’ll agree to disagree on this one.

Janet:    Yeh. You know what, I think you’ve got your use cases and I’ve got mine.

Louis:    Yeh and I think it varies, it can vary a lot. I know that certainly millennials are very active on social media. I don’t know that they want to spend much time engaging with brands there. I think they mostly want to spend time with their family and friends.

Janet:    Well it’s the people, and that I guess is where you and I are going to agree to disagree. So I think there’s a school of mind about social media that it’s — and McKinsey study couldn’t have pointed this out clearer — so if you post something on social media versus email it about your business, what’s more effective? Well, this is the Duh study of the year. Duh, the email. That’s not the purpose of social media. The purpose of social media is to connect you with people so you can have a conversation and gather information. Those that don’t get that will always have low read and returns. It’s that simple to me.

Louis:    Yeh, no, I understand that. And I agree with that. And that’s how Jay McBain and I first connected as well. You know, I sent him something on social media, a piece I had done about the channel. He said, Oh terrific. And then I mentioned the podcast and I said, you know, I would love to have you as a guest and a few weeks later he was on.

Janet:    There you go.

Louis:    And you know, I’ve developed many relationships that way and I think that is one of the real strengths of social media. But let’s get back to what you do. The, you know, you’ve worked with companies at JS Group in many industries, many sizes. Let me ask you about enterprises and startups. Do you see some commonality among the challenges for enterprise vendors today? Companies that have mature channel programs, but maybe they’re too mature and maybe they need to go in new directions?

Janet:    You know it’s interesting when you look at the companies that are in enterprise and trying to shrink down, particularly in software as a service. A lot of them started enterprise hardware and now they’re saying, Hey, software and software democratizes technology, right. So it can be available to increasingly smaller customers. Their programs were either built to appeal to the top partners or they were built with distribution to appeal to the long tail. And I think that’s where these enterprise vendors are having, they’re struggling versus the guy who started, or gal who started, as a digital native business in the cloud as a startup with some PE money, who never sold anything direct started down market and now all of a sudden people are starting to use that market, right.

And the unified communication as a service market whether you’re talking about, you know, 8×8, Zoom, Nextiva, you know, you name your company you like — they’ve all done that. They’ve all started low and went high. And you would not be able to be alive in the industry right now if you haven’t seen a win story from any of those brands about them taking a big enterprise account who was forever Avaya or Cisco. Or you know, you name your PBX vendor of choice or even UCaaS vendor of choice and all of a sudden they’re moving over. And why? Because those companies didn’t start from the phone in enterprise, they started from the video and the you know, quote unquote “conference call” and they came at the phone that way because I don’t know about you. When was the last time you made a phone call?

Louis:    Yeh.

Janet:    Everything’s on, you know, you’re joining a meeting, you’re joining a link, we’re on UberConference today. By the way funniest hold music ever. Right, their claim to fame.

Louis:    Right.

Janet:    But when you think about it, UberConference starts from — the platform we’re recording on — It starts from the conference call and not a desk phone making a phone call, even though there’s only two people on this. And so when you think about that “enterprise” quote unquote, right as a software startup, they’re starting in many instances from the wrong technology layer. And that’s a pretty big challenge to then also try to change your partner program.

Louis:    Oh, interesting. Okay. What about at the other end of the market, the startups? You’ve worked with startups, what do you, commonality do you see across the challenges that they have in launching or scaling a channel program?

Janet:    You know, it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s big, you know, they’re some great channel companies in the world, right? I’ll use Cisco, Cisco has always been a phenomenal channel company. You know it is not to be underestimated what a good channel company needs to set up. It’s not as simple as I’ve got a program guide with some training benefits and I’m good to go. There are systems, there are channel salespeople that work with the channel and the customers. There are channel program managers. There are channel account managers. There’s order management, there’s quote to cash, there’s billing, there’s a million things in the journey that if you’re going to go channel change substantially from how you do it in direct sales.

And so often what we see with the startups is where the plus and minus, right. The plus is, clean slate, they have no nasty legacy systems that are going to take five years and $20 million with IT to get done. There’s no IT priority list that they can’t get on. They don’t have dated people, dated approaches, angry partners. They have none of that. And they don’t have a dated program that they have to try to rip benefits out. But then the partners, even though they don’t use them will complain about in your given media choice of what you want to read that day. Yet they don’t have all the other things, the channel salespeople, the channel account managers, the in-depth sales enablement process, et cetera. So that’s kind of the plus and minus.

My take though is these startups are going to knock some considerable vendors off their charts in the next three to five years because they are digitally savvy, they get how the partners want to make money now, and they’re dealing with new kinds of partners that the traditional vendors have shied away from.

Louis:    Yeh, I agree. I think often some startups greatly underestimate what it takes to be successful in the channel and will think, Oh, it’d be great if other companies were selling our stuff too. But don’t appreciate until they really dig down and get going on it how much effort it takes. It is, as we’ve said, more efficient than going direct, especially when you get into other territories. But it takes a lot of work.

Janet:    I agree.

Louis:    So Janet, thank you for being on today. How can people contact you?

Janet:    Two ways if you are on social media, of course I’m on LinkedIn, I’m @channelsmart on Twitter, so if you want to DM me because that’s easier on either of those platforms or Facebook I’m pretty easy to find. That last name Schijns is not a common one. And so I think I’m the only Janet Schijns you’ll find on most of those platforms. Or of course you can always text me on 908-883-2020. Or visit our website, www.jsgnow.com

Louis:    Great. And we’ll put those into the program notes on the revenueassociate.biz website. Yeah Louis Gudema’s not a name I have to fight too much for social media properties either.

Janet:    It’s great right. It’s good to have a weird name in this world.

Louis:    Yeh. Is that Dutch, Schijns?

Janet:    It is, my husband, I was Janet Smith. So my husband, I owe my husband a debt of recognizable last name there.

Louis:    Right. There’s an advantage to it. Yeh, my parents were from The Netherlands also.

Janet:    Ah, very good, okay.

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

So thank you again, Janet for being on.

Janet:    My honor and pleasure and I liked debating with you. Always fun.

Louis:    And 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.