Transcript

Jean O’Neill:       So it’s really easy for me on a very regular basis to go in and pull numbers and see exactly where I am. Everything from how many leads has a partner sent us, to how many of those did we win, how many did we lose, how long did it take to get from opening to closing, whether it was won or it was lost. And again, I’m pretty transparent, I take these reports and I share them with my partners. And we sit down on QBRs and discuss them and talk about these metrics and how do we change them? How do we, again, back to what I do every day, how do we put more money in my partners pocket, which means close more business.

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

Louis Gudema:  Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast where we talk with leaders in software partner programs to learn about what’s working today. I’m Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates, where we help companies grow faster by helping their channel partners market better and grow faster.

Today I’m talking with Jean O’Neill, Vice President of Channel at Cyxtera, who has over 20 years of technology industry experience with deep expertise within the channel. She was instrumental in building the channel programs at Rackspace, Terremark, Verizon and Involta. She has counseled, mentored, and supplied channel consulting to companies in their initial stages. And Jean is an active member of Cloud Girls and has received a 2019 CRN Women of the Channel Award.

Jean, welcome to the podcast.

Jean:     Thank you so much. You make me sound much more important than I feel on a daily basis.

Louis:    Well we’ll get to what you do on a daily basis in a minute. I saw you say at one point, actually it was you’re CRN Women of the Channel listing asking about some things outside of work. And you said that you love podcasts and that you’d rather be reading. Do you have any great podcasts or books that you’d recommend?

Jean:     Well. So sadly, I’m going to do a huge disservice to my technology brethren. All the podcasts and books that I listen to have nothing to do with technology. So I use podcasts and I use books to kind of escape the technology world.

Louis:    That’s perfectly fine. That’s perfectly fine.

Jean:     Yeh, and there’s so many, I’m trying to think off the top of my head one that I would really recommend. But they’re all pretty disparate and myriad and kind of odd. A lot of the podcasts have to do with comedy, simply because I think that the best way to release any sort of anxiety, any sort of overwhelm, which we can sometimes do everybody in day to day and in technology since it’s so quickly moving. You can sometimes feel completely out of touch and I think that humor always brings, not just you as an individual, that connection with who you are. But of course comedy is a great way to connect with other people too and finding common ground.

And so I find myself using a bit of comedic relief, especially when meeting folks for the first time, just to make everybody feel a little bit more comfortable. So I think listening to something that puts you kind of in that frame of mine kind of loosens you up and helps you understand who you are as an individual and not just who you are as an employee and as somebody representing a company.

Louis:    Oh, that’s great. That sounds like both fun and useful. So please fill us in a bit more on your career path. What brought you where you are today and your focus on the channel?

Jean:     Oh my goodness, that’s such a long story because I am an elder as I like to, it makes me sound really important like an elder statesman.

Louis:    No, I’ve met you and I don’t call you an elder. I wouldn’t describe you as an elder.

Jean:     I will share that my second grandchild was just born on Friday. So I am a grammy that makes me officially an elder and I embrace that.

Louis:    Well, my mother-in-law became a grandmother when she was 44.

Jean:     Oh goodness. Well I’m grateful I was not 44 when I became a grandmother.

Louis:    Okay. It actually doesn’t take much to become a grand… if you’re 22 when you have your child and they’re 22, it’s not that hard to do.

Jean:     No, no, no. I counseled my son to hold off as long as possible. Be an adult, enjoy your marriage before you bring kids in because once you have them, they are forever.

Louis:    Okay. So getting back to the career path?

Jean:     I fell into technology and I have found from a lot of other folks that they kind of do that. To make a really long story short, I was actually in women’s high-end retail, and I knew that that was not the best way to support myself and my son being a single parent. So I decided that I needed to A go to school and get a degree. So I was what they called a returning student. I graduated when I was in my early thirties, magna cum laude, because I would pat myself on the back for that. And I was working in a retail store, I lived in Atlanta and there were some folks that worked or had gone to school at Georgia Tech who started introducing me to the world of technology.

So I went to work for a software development company and this was right when the worldwide web was just coming out. And having my degree in communication, for me, it was seriously a paradigm shift. That light bulb went off and it just resonated with me that this new form of communication was where I wanted to be and where I wanted to be involved.

So I went to work for the software company. From there I went to work for a technology recruiting company, which allowed me to touch and see so many different facets of technology. So many different ways that it was being used and all of the people and the tools that were, the tools they were using to build it was just phenomenal to see all of this on the cusp. And this is back in 1997 or so, no actually ’95.

So back then people still did CD-ROMs. The internet was this very unknown. People didn’t really delve into it. People had computers at work, they didn’t have personal computers so much. God knows cell phones weren’t really a thing. But it just attracted my attention. So I went into direct sales and I did really well. And then I had an opportunity through a mentor of mine to shift into channel and to build channel, which had not existed at all, with a company that was based in New Zealand and they needed a channel in South, Central and North America.

And my creed has always been, I don’t know what I don’t know. Which means if I haven’t tried it, I haven’t failed at it. So I said, absolutely, I’ll do channel, I’ll do this. What I learned about myself is that I enjoy and I excel at building relationships. What I didn’t enjoy about direct selling was that I would walk in and build this relationship and sell and then I would hand them to somebody else to account manage and walk away. And that left me feeling unfulfilled. Whereas with channel I get to build and grow and maintain these relationships over long periods of time. That’s where my heart and my soul really sit.

Louis:    I’ve actually heard something similar from some other people on the podcast: that it’s the relationship and that kind of long-term working together with partners that they really enjoy.

Jean:     Yeh. Well it takes a special kind of crazy to work with channel.

Louis:    So before we get too far along, why don’t you tell people what Cyxtera is and what you sell and who you sell to?

Jean:     Absolutely. So Cyxtera — and thank you so much for pronouncing it properly — Cyxtera is data center services and security company. We are a little over two and a half years old. We are a $2.8 billion company. We are the second-largest data center services provider in the world. We are an anomaly from a data center services perspective, which of course is in a very simple term hosting. We are the only provider who has and offers built-in cybersecurity offerings.

So we have other folks out there, competitors who will offer a third-party solution. All of the solutions that Cyxtera represents are wholly owned by and managed by Cyxtera. So we do not work within specific verticals. Hosting is such a big arena. If anybody needs to put their data in somewhere that’s safe and secure and has these cybersecurity offerings, we’re the person that you go to.

Now obviously since we do have the cybersecurity, there are certain industries that will come to us. We do a lot of government, we do a lot of federal, we do banking, finance, we do legal, we do healthcare. But we will also do restaurant chains and we’ll also do automotive chains. And anybody and everybody who needs global presence for their data center services.

Louis:    Some people may say, how can you be a multibillion-dollar company in two years? But Cyxtera was formed from the acquisition of CenturyLink’s portfolio of data centers and co-location business and Medina Capitals, security and data analytics portfolio.

Jean:     Absolutely. That is perfectly worded. Yes. So we acquired what was at that time the 57 CenturyLink data centers, which are also for those who remember way back formerly Quest, some formerly Savis. We have also started adding to that portfolio, both by acquisition and by building. We are, as you mentioned, Manny Medina, who was the founder of Terremark. So we’ve taken a lot of principles of custom build that we learned at Terramark and we’re now introducing them into Cyxtera.

And then there were four cybersecurity companies. We acquired a fifth shortly after Cyxtera formed to come under the Cyxtera umbrella. Thus the high price tag.

Louis:    And just as you were arriving at Cyxtera in September, 2017, the company launched its global partner network. So what is the role of the channel at Cyxtera today and how does it fit into your go-to market strategy?

Jean:     Well, it’s as you can imagine, we certainly can’t talk about Cyxtera’s channel program without discussing it against CenturyLink. Part of the acquisition of course, was acquiring all of the channel relationships that were built through the CenturyLink relationship that because of the co-location business came over to Cyxtera.

So when I came in two years ago, we were at the beginning of transferring ownership of those legal documents, which was a big lift, over on to Cyxtera paper. And of course, helping all of those existing partners understand who we were, how we work, what the advantages are. Anytime there’s change, because humans just really don’t embrace change. There’s always a thought of What’s happening? Is this advantageous for me? Is this something I want to embrace? There’s always trepidation.

So it was very important that we at Cyxtera channel help these folks understand that for the most part it was going to be not just business as usual, but better than business as usual because of the legacy Terramark channel program, the legacy we put channel first that some of these folks had not experienced with other providers. So a big chunk of what we were doing was helping them understand, first of all, what we acquired from CenturyLink. What it would be like working with us. And a lot of, a lot of listening.

Somebody very wise told me, and this goes through my head a lot, which is you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion.

So it really required a lot of the channel at Cyxtera listening to the concerns, listening to the issues of these partners that we inherited to help address them. But we also know, as my grandma always used to say, the proof is in the pudding. So your word is only as good as it can be as long as you back it up. So it was also completely imperative and important to us to make promises, to stick by those promises and to deliver.

So initially most of our time was really spent getting to know our partners, helping them get to know us. As you pointed out, a $2.8 billion company that comes out of nowhere can be a startling thing. So helping them understand who we were as a company and who the channel folks were as individuals became very, very important.

Louis:    So sounds like there was a lot of proving yourself and developing, re-establishing personal relationships that may have been either non-existent or strained a little bit by the whole acquisition?

Jean:     Yeh. You know, people were cautious and I don’t blame them. I would have been cautious as well. One of the advantages of 20 years in this industry was so many of these partners I had worked with before. So I was able to short circuit and kind of circumvent some of the awkwardness that others may have experienced because I’d been working channel West Coast for so very long. But that didn’t make their concerns any less valid, but it did help knowing that we already had a history of trust in our relationship to move things forward a little more swiftly.

Louis:    So I think you just said that at Cyxtera you’re channel first?

Jean:     We are absolutely channel first. We have always had an idea, and sometimes an idealism of knowing how valuable channel is, how much channel contributes to, not only to our reach but also to our reputation. The beauty of channel and one of the many reasons I’m attracted to it is here’s an opportunity to have people say amazing things about you without them being on your payroll. So obviously with compensation involved, right. But I’m a firm believer in how do we find one plus one equals three. How do we make decisions? How do we get messaging? What can we do that becomes exponentially larger than what we could do on our own? And to me, channel has been and continues to be the answer to that question.

Louis:    So what percentage of Cyxtera revenue comes from the channel today?

Jean:     We are just shy of 30%.

Louis:    And the rest is direct?

Jean:     The rest is direct as well as please understand, back to the acquisition. So much of it also is expansion, and so expansion of clients because they need more and more space. So yes, we have two numbers, right? We’ve got new sales and then of course we’ve got sales that are either expanding that were legacy accounts from CenturyLink or are renewing from the legacy perspective. So those are kind of two sets of numbers. But current new business is 30% is coming in from channel.

Louis:    Do you have goals to grow that, to make that a larger proportion of Cyxtera revenue, or do you think it’ll stay the same? Some people actually think channel is declining in the tech sector. What direction do you think that will go at Cyxtera?

Jean:     I think that we’re going to continue to grow. I’m going to be curious to see how. I know that as we start to offer new product lines, we are attracting even more potential partners as well as interest from partners that we have. So again, not having just one product offering, not having just the hosting offering, having a hyper-converged infrastructure product called CXD as a co-location on demand sets us apart, and makes us more attractive to both our current partners as well as potential partners.

Having the cybersecurity products, one of which AppGate is not tied to our data centers. So I have partners come to me who say, Hey, I can get credit for selling AppGate even if the client has their data sitting in a different data center than a Cyxtera one or even on-prem or even cloud, and my answer is yes. So I think because we have a more diverse portfolio than some of our competitors, we’re going to continue to see that number climb while others may be experiencing and maybe forecasting that number to decline.

Louis:    Since you have a large direct effort also, the classic issue is channel conflict or that conflict between the internal salespeople and the channel. How do you deal with that at Cyxtera?

Jean:     Oh, it’s a conundrum for everybody. I mean it’s, as everybody knows, I’m pretty transparent about sharing what does and doesn’t work. What I have found, and again, I found this in my entire channel career in technology, there are always going to be those salespeople who want to own everything. That’s who they are. That’s their nature. And then we have of course direct sales across our company, anybody who has channel program — who absolutely embraces and sees the value, even those programs where they might, direct people might take some sort of haircut in working with channel — understands and agrees that they’d rather have a percentage of something than all of nothing. So of course what one does if one is wise, which has been what I do is, look I am such a proponent of channel and such a proponent of what it can do and how it can impact in a positive way the direct sales people’s income. And I find those folks who are, A, not only partner-friendly, but, B, they tend to be the top sellers in a company.

And so when I come up against sales folks who can be resistant to that, I simply use facts and figures. I can be emotionally based and say, but look, these are great people and relationships are going to help you. But what really moves the needle is helping them see that their colleagues who are also sometimes they’re friendly competitors, are the number one sales folks. And one of the reasons, and one of the major contributors is that they are embracing channel and they are embracing partners.

We find over and over again that partners have relationships within companies that the direct sales folks just don’t have. So I might have a direct salesperson who’s calling into a large company and getting nowhere and then I will have a channel partner who says, hey, I have an opportunity for you in this company and I’ve known this person and worked with this person, they know me and they trust me.

So it’s a matter of helping those direct salespeople, who are quite stubborn sometimes, understand that this is a gift. This is an opportunity for you to get into an account that your manager expects you to get into, that you have been not successful at. And utilizing these contacts to get in and to move the needle and to put money in your pocket. And that seems to work pretty well.

Louis:    A lot of companies have told me about how they’ve had to structure their financial incentive so that the direct salespeople see that they’re going to do fine by working with partners?

Jean:     Oh absolutely. Not only do they do fine, they do well. Again, my top sales reps all embrace and work with channel regularly. And I found that of course the partners that we have really enjoy working with and having that particular person as a resource when working with that client. Because you’ve now taken again one plus one and making three.

You’ve now taken the channel person’s expertise in how this partner works. You’ve taken that partner’s expertise and whatever it is they do, they offer in their relationship with the client and you now have a direct sales rep who understands Cyxtera’s offerings and all the resources that that person has with all the technology people at Cyxtera. And being able to form a cohesive offering that makes sense to the end-user. And again, money in our pocket puts money in our partner’s pockets, and that’s what I do every day.

Louis:    Yeh. So what do you do every day? Let me ask you that. If you’re going to make a pie chart of your week or your month, how is your time spent?

Jean:     Not pulling out my hair, which is a good thing. I think that for me a typical day, I’ve always got a top three thing to do during the day. Something that’s usually popped up that needs some TLC or a fire that needs to be put out. Because again that’s part of my responsibility is you know, the duck that looks all smooth on top and is paddling like heck underneath right.

My inbox is ridiculous. I am learning because one of the best things about me, which is also one of the worst things about me is that I am incredibly sensitive to time and to attention, which is what makes me really good at what I do. But it also hamstrings me. Because sometimes I will get too deep, too involved and too attached.

So what I spend the first part of my morning doing is looking through the emails that have come in, what’s on fire, what can wait. And I always keep coming back to who are my top producing partners? When am I spending time with them? How can I help them understand who we are more? How can I make sure that I am their first thought, their first choice? I may not always be the right choice, but every day I strive to know that when they hear of an opportunity that we’re the first one that they think of. And I spend a lot of time with these partners finding out if I’m not, why not?

And then if it’s something I need to do as an individual, if it’s something that the company needs to do, if it’s offerings, if it’s programs, if it’s marketing, I spend a good part of my day with internal Cyxtera folks helping them understand this is what’s going on out in the partner ecosystem. This is what they’re asking for, this is what they’re looking for. How do we make that happen? So from a pie chart perspective, I’m in front of partners a lot, I’m on phones with partners a lot. And I am definitely on email a whole lot. And as I mentioned, I took vacation last week, but I took every phone call that came my way, simply because I am a little too attentive at times. But in order to accomplish the goals that I’ve set for myself, that’s kind of a burden that I’ve put on myself.

Louis:    I understand that you have four different categories of partners at Cyxtera. Agents and resellers, service providers and system integrators, infrastructure technology partners, and then the fourth one is a little different, real estate brokers. How does the company interact with those four? Do you have different enablement challenges for each of them?

Jean:     Yeh, we do. So our company from a channel perspective we are divided geographically. So I handle a huge chunk of land. I handle the West Coast, I sit in San Diego. So there are more of me scattered throughout the US who handle the geography in that area. What that means for all of us is that we are responsible for three of those. The fourth, the brokers, are handled by one gentleman, a colleague on my team and he sits out of Chicago and that’s all he does is work with the real estate brokers.

From a reseller perspective we have been very particular, and for good reason, about who we allow to resell. Simply because again we have to feel strongly that this partner knows who we are, can represent us properly. We are incredibly brand-aware. So bringing a reseller in is a big heavy lift of making sure that they support us. They understand not just our products but they understand, you know, who we are, what our ethics are, what our response time is like.

So the vast majority of our partners are referral partners that sit under various masters across the US and Europe. We also of course have managed services folks in there as well, because Cyxtera, one of the things we are not is managed services. So we do partner with a lot of MSPs to provide that service to their clients.

Louis:    I was asking about enablement. So how different is that? What sort of things are you working on in terms of enabling the partners in those three categories that you work with?

Jean:     It comes a lot of education. So again, back to  our basic offerings is what we call you know, straight hosting co-location, which is pretty straightforward. Our co-location on-demand CXD and then our premier product AppGate, which is a zero-trust product to software-defined perimeter.

So it takes a lot of education for folks, especially since so many of the partners that we brought over from CenturyLink were really partners who were spending time in telco. And hosting is not rocket science and it’s not very difficult. But when you get into a hyper-converged infrastructure or CXD. When you get into AppGate, you know, a software-defined perimeter, cybersecurity offering it gets a little bit more convoluted. So I do spend a lot of time with my engineers educating my partners. So that means having lunch and learns, that means doing Webex’s. That means allowing them in the case of AppGate to have access to play with it themselves.

We do of course events with masters to help educate subs. We do events with subs directly to help them understand. It can be a lot of hand-holding initially, but the payoff really, really comes afterwards. So it’s making sure they understand it, giving them white papers, giving them case studies, understanding the difference between Am I educating a partner’s sales reps Or am I educating their engineers because it’s two different messages.

Making sure that there’s follow up. We do monthly newsletters talking about who we are, what we do and how we do it. Being available as well as is always important. I like when I get the calls that say, Hey, I don’t know if you do this, but do you because, A, that means they’ve thought of me, B, hopefully I do what they’re asking. And last but not least, as I referred to earlier, if it’s something we don’t, I can go back to my internal folks and say, Hey, I have a partner asking about this type of solution. What can we do to fulfill it?

Louis:    My area is marketing and so I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about marketing. Do you do anything around enabling partners on marketing?

Jean:     Absolutely. So we actually have drip campaigns ready to go that cover all three of these offerings that we can get started. We do have a director of channel marketing, Tamara Prazak, who is a goddess among women. She works harder and longer than I do. So she is the bridge between the corporate marketing, what we’re doing from a product perspective. So she’s engaged with our product manager, she’s engaged with our corporate marketing and she takes that and puts it kind of through the channel filter. And on the other side comes messages that we can share with our partners that they can implement on their own. And/or we sit down and think about how do we do something that is built specifically for them and for their needs. So we have a massive marketing machine.

Louis:    That’s great. So you have, it sounds like a very personal touch with a lot of your partners. What channel technology do you think is important for managing or growing partners?

Jean:     Well, I think having really strong, we have a really strong partner portal. I’m also of course cognizant that masters have portals as well. And I start to hear pushback from folks that are like, Portal this, portal this, I’m tired of this. I’m tired of having to check my masters portal. I’m tired of trying to, you know, check my vendor’s portal. And I think that that’s where we take a little bit more of a personal interest and a personal touch with folks. But I think when used correctly, and if people will adopt it, it is an amazing, amazing tool.

I also feel very strongly, Cyxtera has a website that is just a marketing marvel. So you should appreciate that given your background and experience. There’s not a whole lot that an end-user and thus a channel partner can’t find that’s not on our website. So if I’m on a plane, which is often, or I’m on a call, which happens, and somebody can’t reach me, I’m always happy to send them to a website. A website’s up 24/7 and they can find a lot of information about our offerings. They can find white papers there, they can find case studies there.

So I always encourage, and I always educate my partners, Look, if you’re tired of looking at portals, go to our website, start there. Because there’s a really good chance that there’s at least a partial answer there and what you can’t find I can fill in or you can fill in either via the portal or with me directly.

Louis:    So what about something like a PRM or through channel partner content marketing software? Are you using those or do you see those as being very important or is it mostly the portal and the website?

Jean:     Well it can be important and of course we use salesforce.com — I say of course, like everybody would know that, right. So for us, we do accept registrations through our portal that fit right into salesforce.com. So there are those partners who embrace it, there are those partners who still want to fill out a paper registration form and send it manually. There are those folks who every time they want to register something, forget that they have those two options. So I gently remind them and guide them every time.

I have a drafts folder in my outbox that have all sorts of premade emails that I can quickly personalize and drop and send for almost every concern, every inquiry, every issue that a partner has. And I think that having that automation makes sense. I of course prefer to do that with my Outlook. Because I can look at it and I can say, yes, this is what I, the message I want to do. I’ve crafted it. We have messages from marketing that I then take and personalize, which I do with their blessing.

We also of course have mass marketing capabilities for using all of the contact information in salesforce.com to get information out to our end users. To get campaigns out, and those go to our partners as well. So there are tools that we can take advantage of and I use a myriad of them depending on what the issue is. If I need to get a big message out to a whole lot of partners, I’ll go through and use one of the tools that we have that connects with salesforce.com. If it’s something that’s on a smaller scale, I prefer to do that a little more personally out of outlook.

Louis:    So how many partners are you working with day to day? You personally?

Jean:     Well that’s a question I get asked a lot and the answer, I don’t have an exact number because if I ever added them up I would probably need a really stiff drink, although there are days when I want an excuse for that. I would say that I personally manage in my territory close to 300 partners.

Louis:    That’s a good number.

Jean:     It’s a big number.

Louis:    Yeh. So do you have KPIs or any sort of dashboard or anything like that that you use or that you think are important for keeping up with, I see these partners are doing great. These partners are falling behind?

Jean:     Yeh. And in fact I am a huge believer in reports and numbers. So in my early example of helping salespeople understand that the top sales folks, you know, using numbers. So I absolutely, I have Ashton who is just a huge assistance. He’s our programs guy. He has put together within Salesforce customized reports because if I had to sit down and do it, I would put a bullet in my head.

So it’s really easy for me on a very regular basis to go in and pull numbers and see exactly where I am. Everything from how many leads has a partner sent us, to how many of those did we win, how many did we lose, how long did it take to get from opening to closing, whether it was won or it was lost. And again, I’m pretty transparent, I take these reports and I share them with my partners. And we sit down on QBRs and discuss them and talk about these metrics and how do we change them? How do we, again, back to what I do every day, how do we put more money in my partners pocket, which means close more business.

So these tools and these reports that we pull out of Salesforce are incredibly instrumental in helping me to find as I do every day where am I spending my time today and which partners am I reaching out to.

Louis:    To change the subject. You’re a member of Cloud Girls.

Jean:     I am.

Louis:    And you’ve talked about the importance of empowering women in technology and I’ve had a few other members of Cloud Girls on the podcast too. So how do you think things are compared to when you were starting out in your channel career?

Jean:     From what perspective?

Louis:    In terms of the opportunities for women, attitudes about, towards women in technology, barriers?

Jean:     Well, I have mixed feelings about that. I’m always, I’m a huge proponent of females in the workforce. I’m a huge proponent of women in technology. I support two companies, technology companies. I’m an angel investor in two that are run by women. I am appalled by numbers when I see how little outside investment and how hard it is for female-run technologies to get funds. I am incredibly disheartened.

On the other end of the spectrum as I attend and as I speak at technology events, I see more and more women in technology. But what I don’t see, I see more and more women in entry-level middle management. I do not see what I would like to see as far as them rising in the ranks. I think that there’s some very well known women that are heading up some technology endeavors, but I would not be at all sad or upset to see that number quadruple.

Louis:    Yeh, the numbers, certainly the funding numbers out of the VC world are really shameful. So, but in terms of creating more opportunities or getting those women that you were talking about within companies to higher levels, how do you think that can be done? What do you think has to happen?

Jean:     Well, I think that it’s, and forgive me, so my major was communication, my minor was sociology. So I have a lot of thoughts on how and where and why, and it really has to come from outside of just technology. We need a societal shift starting with, you know, gee, let’s do something simple like getting equal pay for the same amount of work.

I am still completely gob smacked by the discrepancy and that that date in the spring of every year where I have finally made, not me personally, but women as a whole have made the equivalent of what their male counterparts made for the year before. I am just appalled that we can’t even get to a lack of wage gap. I don’t think that… the foundation has to change before you can start to change the higher echelons. And of course individuals and individual women and technology hit that higher echelon. We need absolutely more equal opportunity to earn the same amount of money as our male counterparts across all industries.

Louis:    Yeh, absolutely. Okay, so I know you have a job to get back to.

Jean:     [laughs] I do have a bit of a job. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you the numbers and I hope they weren’t beeping while we were on the phone of emails that have come in. I was planning to silence my phone before we had this little conversation. It is definitely an all day, every day kind of world for me. But I’m still here so I must enjoy it.

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

Jean:     What keeps me up at night? You know, frankly what keeps me up at night is how do we at Cyxtera and thus the channel program, how do we, it’s a large company, how do we still keep that personal connection? How do we take the power of a $2.8 billion company and allow our partners to benefit from that. But at the same time understand that we are made up of individuals like me who are there and who are available. How do we keep that one-to-one connection while also being a behemoth of a company? So that’s one of the things that kind of shifts through my head. As well as on a more personal level I guess is I have 300 partners. You know how do I make sure that each partner understands that I am available and ready and willing to help them? That can be a daunting thing that can keep me up at night.

Louis:    So how, if people want to talk to you, want to learn more about Cyxtera or your partner program, how can people contact you?

Jean:     Well, they should just drop me an email, it gets dropped in the massive bucket with all the others that I find in my inbox.

Louis:    Okay. What’s your email address?

Jean:     My email is jean.oneill at cyxtera.com

Louis:    Okay. And are you active on LinkedIn? Is that a good one?

Jean:     I am very active on LinkedIn so they can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.

Louis:    All right, terrific. Well, thank you for joining us today Jean. As I do with all guests, I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation.

Jean:     I look forward to that. Even though it’s not reading for pleasure, I’m sure I’ll make my way through it.

Louis:    It’s not as funny as some of the podcasts you listen to I’m sure, but hopefully you’ll enjoy some of it. I found out it was recently named One of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time, so that was something that I.

Jean:     I certainly can’t resist a recommendation like that. I look forward to getting it.

Louis:    So 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.

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