Transcript

John Woodall (Introduction):   I think integrity and ethics trumps everything. Because when there’s conflict and it happens with every partner that we have. I don’t care how good and deep and long the partnership is, things happen that are unfortunate. How a company handles ethical issues and integrity issues says everything about them.

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 we’re doing something a little bit different. Usually, we’re hearing from the leaders of some of the top vendor channel programs and the consultants that they use. But I’m in marketing and I’m always preaching that your marketing should start with better understanding of the market. And for tech vendors, that means not only talking directly with customers, but also with partners. So today we’re talking with a partner about what makes for a great channel program.

I’m talking with John Woodall, vice president of Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems. John has been with Integrated Archive for over 17 years and in the tech industry for over 30 years.

John, welcome to the podcast.

John:     Louis, thank you. Good morning or afternoon, I don’t know what time it is whenever you’re listening to this, but no, it’s great to be on. Thank you.

Louis:    So you’re located in San Jose, pretty much in the heart of Silicon Valley. Tech has been quite a ride over the past 30 years. You’ve seen a lot of changes.

John:     I have, I’ve seen quite a few. I remember punch cards at the very, very beginning of my career and now we’re talking about serverless and cloud and containers. And some things remain the same, some things change at a faster rate. But it’s been a very interesting ride and it seems to be going faster every day.

Louis:    Yeh, it’s never boring, that’s for sure.

John:     Nope, Never.

Louis:    Yeh, I can remember my sister, one of my sisters, doing a project in high school using punch cards to analyze the data and that was pretty high tech then. That was pretty cool.

John:     So was an abacus, but yeh.

Louis:    Yeh. So tell us about Integrated Archive. What are your services? Who are your customers?

John:     Sure. IS — Integrated Archive Systems — we go by IS it’s a quicker, easier thing to say. We’re actually headquartered in Palo Alto. We’re in our 25th year of business, in our 26th we just finished our 25th anniversary. We’ve been serving the tech community for a long time. We started in backup data protection, disaster recovery, hence the name archive. I think if we started the company today it might be a little bit of a different name, but we serve the higher data center if you will traditionally. But now also moving into cloud, dev-ops, AI, machine learning, IoT, the emerging trends and exciting things, if you will, if you listen to the marketing that’s out there. But we’ve been doing this for a long time.

Services, you know, they run the gamut from migration, managed services, you know, the full gamut, cover every vertical. Our sales team isn’t vertically oriented, but think of them as named account. And the way they run, they’re 100% commission. So they work the accounts they want to work. They’re not tied to a zip code or any other boundaries that some of our OEM partners work by. So it’s wide open for our team and they’re quite good at it.

Louis:    Are your customers enterprise or are they SMB or what’s the size of customers you work with?

John:     If I think of a couple of our larger partners and how they stratify their customer base, you know, we would fit in commercial or small and medium enterprise. We work in large enterprise and we work in some of the global accounts in some of our partner’s territories. So we cover the full range.We’re West Coast focused in terms of our physical footprint, but I have customers where we’re doing projects with them in APAC and EMEA on a regular basis. So local customers but with a global footprint. It’s a very small world right now.

Louis:    Yeh, it is. And how many people are in the company?

John:     We’re about 60 people.

Louis:    Okay. You know, one other thing that I noticed was, which is noteworthy, is that it’s a woman-led company.

John:     Yes. Amy Rao is our founder and exec, chief executive officer. And she’s just an amazing person. She had the vision early in her career that a lot of people that were kind of selling to customers, they weren’t really taking good care of them. And so she thought she could do a better job of having a great customer experience, and that’s what motivated her early on to start this business.

And you know, we’re very, very high touch, and our customers have been with us a long time. I’ve had customers for the 17 plus years that I’ve been at IS and it’s not an uncommon story. And a lot of times customers like working with us and when they say change companies, they take us with them. So we develop very long, deep relationships with all of our customers. That’s our goal and we’re very good at that.

Louis:    That’s great. Yeh, high tech, high touch approach. So how many vendors do you partner with and what are some of the names of the companies that people would recognize?

John:     Yeh, if I think of my total line card, it’s something in the range of 55 total partners, but I think our key focus partners are probably, I would say, are NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, Red Hat, Invidia, Dell and others. Palo Alto Networks and many others.

Louis:    Yeh, that’s why I wanted to talk to you because you have dozens of partners and some of the big names in the industry. Some others, you know, beyond what you mentioned, I figured you’d seen kind of the good, the bad and the ugly…

John:     It sounds like a Clint Eastwood film, but you’re right.

Louis:    …of being on the partner side. What are you looking for when you decide which technologies and which companies you want to partner with? What are the elements that you’re looking for in making that decision?

John:     We’re a small agile organization in terms of headcount, how we operate, but we do have some methodology around how we onboard partners if you will, and select them. Part of it is we’re always looking at trends in technology and practices in the fields we touch. And so we’re plugged into a lot of startups in early phases. They may not have products that are quite ready for us to represent them, but we keep an eye on them.

And there’ve been a few over the years where they’ve eventually come on as partners because we felt that their product had reached a level of maturity and stability that it was worth taking to our customers. But we’re always looking for, and I think, you know, just to kind of digress — we’re always, I mean right now I think networking and security in particular are probably the most fluid areas of our line card because it’s an area where threat vectors are popping up on a regular basis. We’re hearing about more and more breaches in the news. So it’s an area where there’s a lot of investment in the startup community and there’s a lot of interest from customers. So that’s one area.

But I think when we are looking for a mature technology, we’re looking for a fit. I mean, as a reseller, and I’ll use storage as an example. I have multiple storage vendors I have NetApp, Hitachi, I have Pure, I have Dell EMC and others that I can pick from. We always have to have two, if you will, in any category, because I can partner with one, then that’s great, but if I can’t partner, I still have a job to go sell. So I need to have an alternative plan or if customers have preferences so we usually have multiple product offerings in a given use case or fit in the stack.

And then once we onboard them, that really comes down to, and I’ve had this discussion many times over the years, a good partnership for us — once we’ve identified that it’s a good technology, that it’s a fit in the market that our customers are going to want and need to consume this technology — It does come down to a number of things. One is enablement and training, so there’s a technical side of that. There’s maybe certifications and as a partner that comes down to margin enhancement, right, hitting higher levels of certification with the vendor, competency level certifications, being able to demonstrate that we’re competent in the sizing, the deployment, and the management and ongoing use of the product.

There’s a sales enablement piece which you know is really block and tackle sales around account mapping and alignment. Working with marketing on target lists and just doing those traditional kinds of things. Most every vendor to varying degrees depending on how large they are is pretty good at that. I think the area where, and they can be large partners, they can be small partners, that has less to do with their success with me in the channel. Certainly larger partners have more capabilities, and more tools perhaps, but it’s their willingness to learn my business. It’s a willingness to come in and understand our team, our field team, how their teams map to us. And then making the investment in personal face to face time to develop relationships because it is — sales still, even in a world where a lot of decisions are made in social media, blogs, your network of fellow technology folks that you have in your Rolodex or in your contact list, kind of mixed different ages there.

What’s a Rolodex? It’s in my contact list on my phone. I mean, okay, whatever. I scroll or I flip either way.

Anyway, at the end of the day it’s that personal investment in building relationships because people do business still with people they like and they like to do business with and they trust. So you can’t do that completely without interaction. And you can’t learn somebody’s business over the phone or on WebEx or Zoom meeting. You really have to spend time. And I think in an early partnership and growing it and building a pipeline together, it does require an investment probably more so from the OEM, I think, than the partner. Although both have to invest. To help us learn how you best sell your product, to make sure that we’re comfortable, that we know how to handle objections, that we know how to do U-turns with your product, how we handle your competition, and that just takes time and investment and it does take time. The partners who do that, we will build a pipeline and we become very self-sufficient and we become less dependent upon them over time. The partnerships where we struggle, I think the channel is something that they either view as a, Yeh we need to have a channel program, so how do we do that? Or okay I’ve gone about as far as I can with my direct team, I need to, you know, kind of a force multiplier effect. So I need channel partners. Versus those that start with, we’re going to build a channel-friendly channel-successful program and we’re going to build our business around that. And that means our business goes through the channel and they know how to have that discussion with a customer. They know how to have that discussion with other partners and manage potential conflicts or objections. Kind of like way far afield but there’s a lot to it.

Louis:    Yeh, a lot of the people that I’ve talked to on the podcast are leaders of some major channel programs and so they tend to have a pretty high percentage of their revenue coming indirect, coming from the partners. A few of them have been people who are launching channel programs, so they may be at five or 10% but their goal is, in one case someone was at 10% of the company’s revenue two years ago, but now they’re at 50%, because the company is going to heavily invest and make channel very central to what they do. But from what you’re saying is it’s that relationship. It’s funny that you were talking about onboarding vendors because vendors talk about onboarding partners.

John:     Yes.

Louis:    And I guess it works both ways. So it sounds like the relationship with that channel manager or whatever the title of the person is from the vendor is pretty key to you?

John:     Yes, that’s absolutely key. If I think of the best channel managers that we’ve had over the years, they have shown up, they have invested personal time, they understand our business, they know all the deals in our pipeline. They know their business well enough to know their programs and their products. And they have the internal relationships to get things done within their company. And so when they’re able to reach back into their organization and go, Okay, for IAS, you know, we want to grow them this way. They have a model in their mind of how they want us to grow with them and so they know how to go find the right resources. They know the programs they have, they know the potential margin enhancements and rebates that they want to put in front of us as incentives. And then they come back and they understand our business. The ones that fail, they may be big and they may have programs. But it comes down to the person that is showing up in our offices, are they able, do they know their business well enough to sell their product is one of my litmus tests. Could they stand up in front of a customer if one of my people was sick and close a deal? You know that’s kind of the question I have in my mind.

Do I get that sense of, they know their company well enough to know their value proposition, their competition, and how to close the deal. On the technical enablement side is their technical counterpart, their technical partner manager, if you will, able to size their products and to understand how to technically sell their product to a customer. If they are able to do that, and bring the best of what their programs offer, that’s going to be a great relationship.

Louis:    So do you have QBRs with all of your vendors?

John:     Most, it depends on the level of partnership. Some probably not. For the ones we do, they’re all larger in terms of revenue attainment goals or level of partnership and they’re in however they’ve stratified their community. So for those that we have that, yeh, we do, we do have a number of regular QBRs.

Louis:    I know that for some companies, that kind of personal relationship that you’re talking about is there with all their partners. But some of the larger vendors, they have some partners who are really on a digital relationship. That sounds like that wouldn’t work so well for you?

John:     It works. I think that’s, you know some companies are more that way and I think perhaps the lower you are in the food chain if you will — to put it that way — of a partners stratification from lower level to higher levels ranking that they do on partners. The lower the level, the less human interaction you’re going to get. Then there’s some large partners who their preference is as they’re newer companies is to use digital tools and less in person. And you may find that your channel managers on the other side of the country in that case. In which case that’s the only tools that are available to you except for maybe an occasional QBR where they may show up, you know, in person.

Louis:    Yeh. But your culture, as you were saying, is very much built on high touch.

John:     Our culture and our success had been built on high touch. We do it with partners, we do it with customers, we try to be efficient in how we spend our time. But the value of relationships cannot be overlooked and this is kind of our fundamental tenant. Our integrity matters and our relationships matter. Because beyond that, as a reseller, you know it’s how we spend our time. It’s the reputation and the excellence that we demonstrate. And it comes down to relationships and to people: know us well enough to work with us.

Louis:    Yeh, I hear that a lot from people that I’m talking to. I was actually just at a conference this week, a channel conference. And one of the people, one of the channel leaders, was saying he has over 2 million miles on one airline and a million miles on a second airline. That’s how much he’s, which I felt kind of bad. It’s sort of like, Honey, I’ll see you at Thanksgiving or something like that.

John:     Oh my goodness. Yeah. How many beds a year? How many nights do you sleep in a different bed? You know, kind of math, it’s not good math to be doing.

Louis:    Yeh. I know an investment banker who has that kind of, and he has, you know, millions of miles and he has no interest in using them. The last thing he wants to do on vacation is travel some more.

John:     Exactly. Yeah. Staycation is the word there.

Louis:    Yeh. So releases used to be a few times a year from many companies early in your career, but now it’s really daily. And so how do your best vendors keep your team up to date with all their changes and how to implement them and support them? With dozens of vendors and dozens of employees, this must be a real challenge for you?

John:     It can be, it can be daunting at times because you’re right. The rate of innovation or the fact that people have adopted more dev-ops culture in what they’re doing and fail-fast/fix-fast approaches on their development cycles. Yes I have some vendors releasing every one to two weeks in some of their cloud offerings, if not sooner based on what they’re doing. Even for the quote-unquote hardware products, their release schedules have increased to, you know twice a year in some cases.

So keeping pace with some of that is a challenge. That comes down to a good channel manager. Because if I think of my top partners and where 80% of our revenue comes from, I think of, there’s no way a single person can keep track of all of the change in a reasonable amount of time. It’d become a full-time job just to do that. So I leverage, I have to leverage my channel teams and the better channel teams. They know our business, they know our capabilities and what we’re interested in, what our growth areas were, run rate business is. And they’re able to distil down and feed us a summarized view of Here’s what you need to know. Here’s what was just announced. Here are the quick, the paragraph that you need to know from a sales perspective. Here’s a link for some training.

And then they’ll follow up with an in-person visit if they’re really good at what they do. And get on our sales, we have a weekly cadence of sales meetings for all the field teams, you know, engineering, marketing, sales and they’ll get on the schedule to come in and update us. And so we have a chance as an entire team. We also have a monthly engineering meeting, which is an all-day, once-a-month, all of our engineer’s pre and post are out of the field with few exceptions. You know, customers always come first. But as best we can, we have everybody in the same discussions and get updates and training on products, either new partners or existing partners and their new announcements and releases.

And then we do ad hoc training as it comes up. We’ll try to catch as many as we can. We send people to training and they do train the trainer. When they come back, people will summarize what they’ve learned and send it out to the respective teams that matter. So we take a lot of different approaches. Some of its just keeping track online. Some of it’s doing training. Some of it’s just working with the vendor on setting up formal training. So if it’s something new from the vendor and new for our team in terms of sales motion, we’ll also set up regular recurring mandatory kind of lunch and learns for the field facing team.

Louis:    You were saying you do security also?

John:     Yes.

Louis:    And has that been at the company the whole time or is that a newer offering?

John:     In terms of our history, that’s not where we started. As I opened with, we started in backup and data protection disaster recovery. Integrating solutions at the time were not well integrated. But, again — high touch, great customer experience. Our customers like doing business with us and so we picked up the rest of her lines, initially largely driven by customer demand. Hey, You sold us our tape, you sold us our backup software, you’ve integrated it, you sold us our storage. Do you do networking? Do you do servers? Do you do compute? Well? And so that was early on but it’s the demand from our customers that drove us.

And I think that I noticed that different resellers have a different set of roots or DNA. Ours is storage, that’s our DNA. And we moved towards network and security. There’s other companies that are network and security and they tend to move towards storage. Because everyone is moving towards, you know, full-stack if they haven’t already, Full-stack integration, full-stack capabilities, on-prem and in the cloud. And so security has to play an increasingly high percentage of your discussions and opportunities because there’s just so many more ways people can exploit than there ever have been and it just keeps growing. So yes, security is something we’ve been growing into. It’s not our largest segment, but it’s a good percentage of our business and it’s a growing percentage of our annual revenue.

Louis:    Yeh. That’s an area that really has like almost daily new threats.

John:     Yes. I look to our network and security team on the engineering side and they’re probably — you know, we use Slack internally — and they are probably some of the most prolific posters on Slack in terms of vulnerabilities, threats and products we should be looking at. So it’s a dynamic space.

Louis:    Okay. So I’ve heard just in the past few weeks of vendors significantly improving their financial incentives for partners. And also automating and making payments faster. Are you seeing that or do I just have a small sample?

John:     I think we’re seeing some of it. I don’t know how pervasive what you’re seeing is. I don’t have that point of reference. I would say that I know that there are a number of my partners who are working on increasing rebates or other incentives based on either QBR or quarterly — not QBR in the sense of a formal sit down — but quarterly metrics they track on certain activities to incentivize our behavior or to try to incentivize customer behavior. And if they’re successful in that, yes, there is additional margin to be had either on the front end or back end or both depending on the partner.

Louis:    What I was hearing some of the vendors saying is that rather than making payments at the end of the quarter or making bonuses at the end of the year or whatever it may have been, that now they’re trying to automate that and say, Okay, we know you did that deal so we can pay you now.

John:     Well, I think the funny corollary, I don’t know how, I don’t know if it’s kind of like you know, temperature goes up in the summer, swimming, drowning and swimming accidents goes up and so does ice cream consumption. There’s not a statistical correlation, but is there a relationship? I don’t know. I think that what I see is people demand, customers demand simpler, easier ways to consume technology. So we see that on the hardware side or the move towards software-defined for many things because customers want to spend less time dealing with the product and more time dealing with the project.

We’re seeing you know cloud adoption is in many cases a shift towards it’s just easier. It may not be cheaper, it maybe presents a number of other different challenges, but it’s simpler. I don’t have to do upgrades, I don’t have to capacity plan, I just consume. And I think on the how do I as a reseller work with partners, we are seeing multiple partners really heavily engaged and simplifying how they work with us. And that is through what used to work but doesn’t work as they scale or doesn’t work as they have broader portfolios that they want us to sell. They just have made certain either logical assumptions about how the deal flows and sales operations works. And/or how automated some of the tasks that used to be more manual and have streamlined the tools and optimized their data sources.

I mean renewals for example, is an area that typically there’s a lot of extra work to make sure you’ve got the right install base data and that’s a really simple thing. But not very many vendors do that very well and yet it’s an important part of the revenue stream. So we’re seeing what you’re describing in terms of automation, simplification and ease of doing business operationally from multiple vendors and they’re just at different phases in rolling out new programs or new tools to support that.

Louis:    Yeh, those are the two words I hear a lot at our simplification and automation. They’re trying to reduce the friction. I mean it’s really that consumer thinking coming to the B2B world. How can we make this frictionless and make the experience of a partner as good as or closer to what a consumer expects?

John:     I mean what it really boils down to for our business is this: If you have a compelling product, two companies have a great product, and one is hard to work with, we’re going to sell more of the other, it’s that simple. Our sales team is 100% commission. How they spend their time is how they make their money. And if you waste their time at this point on being hard to work with, hard to engage, hard to get paid in a timely manner, so on and so forth, they’re going to lose interest even if they like your product. It’s just a natural fact that that happens. They’ll migrate towards simple.

Louis:    Getting the attention of the salespeople is pretty critical.

John:     If you want to make money, yes it is.

Louis:    It is, it is. So let’s talk about that. How do the best vendors do that? How do they get mind share with the sales force?

John:     Great deal registration programs that are really clearly defined. Because if they know, Okay, we’re at this level, this is what we get with registered pricing, they’re off going and doing what they need to do. If they have to go wait for a long time to get registration or it’s not clear that they have registration, again they may prefer to work with another vendor down the road because they want to be protected for the investment of time that they’re making.

Additionally, I think, you know the automation piece, you know we’re seeing better tooling. The better vendors give us more access to their own tools so it feels like you’re more an extension of their team and we become more self-sufficient and are able to run deals cradle to grave, if you will, without the vendor being involved unless we want them to be involved for relationship or other reasons. We don’t need them to be involved because we have the same access to the tools they have, we have access to the same information they have, and we’re able to do that business without them, if that’s what we need to do. And I think, in the lower end of the market, small and medium enterprise and commercial spaces, if a vendor doesn’t allow a partner to function that way, they’re going to have a hard time penetrating those segments of the market.

Louis:    So what about on the marketing side? What kind of marketing support are the best vendors offering you and do you take advantage of it?

John:     Yeh, we absolutely do. I mean marketing, development funds are always key and that’s a nice, you know, hey there’s a reward for your performance in terms of marketing dollars and however the program is set up, how that gets spent. We do a lot of joint activities with partners leveraging those funds. In fact, we do multi-vendor events that are complementary vendors so we can pool the effect of those marketing dollars and then track the ROI on that spend. That’s been effective. Whether that’s a large, almost like a mini-vendor fair with lunch and a TED style series of presentations that are 15 to 20 minutes quick hit around a theme. We’re doing more and more workshops with vendors or again complimentary vendors.

Because I don’t think our customers, the ones that are either technical influencers or decision-makers, it’s like I can talk to you about vendor ABC and do something. But really how they use vendor ABC’s product is with vendor DEF’s product as well, they tend to be a natural fit. So when we find those alignments in use cases we try to do events tailored to specific customers. We’ve gone away from, we still do webinars, but we’ve found that workshops are a higher quality use of our time and the customer’s time and result in better contacts to follow up on.  Because we’ve actually helped them probably learn something they need for their day to day job or have demonstrated through that process expertise that they may not have been fully aware of from our side.

So kind of customer appreciation events like golf tournaments and things like that I think fade over time in their effectiveness. And I think doing more like hackathons and meetups and hangout type activities, and participating just as a technologist in those, gets us some more if you will, grassroots street cred. And I think you have to go both hoodie and suit in how you market, if you will.

Louis:    Okay. Well said.

John:     Right, because that’s the nature of the world that we live in is. There’s a bunch of guys in hoodies, guys and gals who are doing amazing technology work. And you have to be in their world and give them a reason to care about you. And it’s not about the more traditional approaches. And then there are still higher-level kind of the suit side where you do need to have a very business-oriented discussion around Here’s how I can help your time to market. Here’s how I can help you find new monetary streams. Here’s how we can leverage your use of data more intelligently to drive operational efficiency. So there’s kind of two sides to that discussion and they’re both equally important.

Louis:    So we’ve been mostly talking about best practices. But as we said at the beginning, you’ve probably seen the good, the bad and the ugly. So you don’t need to name any names.

John:     I would never do that.

Louis:    What is a vendor that in your opinion, kind of blew it with you or they didn’t have a good program, they didn’t have a good relationship?

John:     Okay. You know, when vendors come in that are new to us and they come into with a product offering that we already have one of, but we’re always interested to see, there’s innovation or maybe we do want another one in that part of our portfolio. And they come in and they sit down in a meeting with the sales team and they threaten your install base with another vendor that we already have run rate business with. Big no no. They don’t say it in a, We’re going to take it out. But they just leave the feeling that, We’re going to go after that footprint in your accounts with or without you kind of discussion. Okay. You just lost the entire audience. Bye. See ya. You know, thanks for lunch. So that’s kind of at one end of the spectrum, it’s like not knowing your audience and not respecting where we’ve been successful. Really bad move.

The other one is channel’s a lip service. Somebody’s told an executive in either sales or operations or the CEO, You need to have a channel program. And they look around at their peers in the industry and they’re like, Yeh, they have channel programs. And so they actually go and they hire really good channel people. They go and cultivate the right team on the channel side. But what they don’t do is make sure that the sales side of that equation, their sales team, behaves in a way that supports that motion towards the channel.

And I’ve seen that repeatedly in some well-known partners that it’s like when we go to your partner advisory board we give you the same complaints year after year and yet nothing changes. You put programs in place, you have the right people, but you don’t enforce it. So it really, it comes across as it was really never a priority as more of a checkbox item that I need to attract channel partners so I have a channel program. But the way they execute on it is they take deals direct. They’ll flip deals behind your back. They’ll undercut your pricing. And I thought we were in a partnership here, I thought we were working together. But the expediency of, and I get the sales pressure to close business, but those are not mutually exclusive positions. You can close business and be successful with your channel, but you have to have rules of engagement that you actually enforce that are not just on paper.

And the companies who’ve done the hard thing of, You know what, we had a top performer on our direct team break the rules of engagement and we fired them. That changes behavior. So that you can play with compensation models as well, where you incentivize people to, we’ll make it channel-neutral. In other words, I make a dollar whether I sell it direct or through the channel. No, you have to weight the compensation I believe to favor the channel to change the behavior. So there’s a number of things there. I think if you’re really going to do a channel program, you really have to have the integrity to make sure that you do it in a way that’s collaborative and that leads to your business going through the channel.

Two, you have to have a sales team that understands that if you’re telling them to leverage the channel and that you have rules of engagement, you have to enforce them. You can’t look the other way. Otherwise, your channel program, you know, you just, you gave the example earlier of going from 10 to 50%. That’s the easy part. The hard part is going from 50 to 80. It’s easy to get to 50. What’s hard is getting beyond that and to get beyond that, you really have to make sure your sales team and your channel team act as one with respect to how you treat your channel.

Louis:    What would make you leave a program. Have, you know, are there major partners that you’ve had, tech partners where you’ve left other than the technologies just being surpassed or becoming, you know –.

John:     Yeh. We have had those issues where we’ve had, we put partners on hold because of technical issues or bugs that were not being addressed. But we didn’t end the relationship, we just put them in timeout if you will. You know we’re back to, we really vet our partners as carefully as we can. We do have some partners that I’m not as thrilled with our performance with for some of the reasons I mentioned earlier about just how they approach their channel program. It’s discouraging to our sales team. So they’re not, again, they’re not going to spend their time where there’s not going to be a return. And those partners, we still have them, we’re not going to drop them, there’s some business there.

Again, it’s back to relationship. If you’re a partner of mine, think of it like you’re part of my family or extended family. You are all very important to me. Some of you I have better relationships with than others because of some of these things, but you’re still important to me. And if there’s still an opportunity down the road to work with you, I want to. Some partners have gone away through merger and acquisition. Some have acquired, some of our partners have been acquired by organizations that have a different approach that we just don’t work with them. And so when they acquired an existing partner, that business over time has just faded, and we stopped investing in certification and training. Because we just weren’t going to work with them. But that takes several years typically for that to happen.  We don’t typically fire partners, they find their level and a lot of the level they find is based on their investment with us.

Louis:    Yeh. So they, the ones that are not as good may not be getting the same level of return from you?

John:     They won’t. Yeh, its how we have to spend our time. If I can’t make the money that I would like to make with you, I have to make it somewhere else.

Louis:    Right. Okay. So what else should I have asked you about today? You know, when you think about the tech partners that you have and the partner programs, what didn’t I ask you that is kind of important to you?

John:     That’s a good question. And we’ve covered ease of doing business, we covered relationships. I think integrity and ethics trump everything. Because when there’s conflict and it happens with every partner that we have, I don’t care how good and deep and long the partnership is, things happen that are unfortunate. How a company handles ethical issues and integrity issues, says everything about them. I have some examples over time in my mind to partners that were not forthright, that were not transparent, and that’s a nice way to say something else. And the effect of that is it damages the partnership. But the people that were directly involved in those things, they’re tainted for us wherever they go, we don’t want to work with them.

Louis:    Yeh, that’s a great point.

John:     I’ve always said that when you put people and money together, you find the true nature of the person.

Louis:    Well said.

John:     And when you find something that you go, Oh, I wish I hadn’t seen that. They, you know have an opportunity to do the right thing in many cases and if they do, that solidifies and strengthens the relationship because nobody wants to not work with somebody. But if somebody doesn’t have integrity and ethics, then we just won’t work with you. Life is too short to deal with that nonsense. So that’s the one thing, if there’s anything else, integrity and ethics is the foundation for good business. It leads to the relationships I was talking about, it leads to trust. And when you have good relationships and trust the rest of it we work through.

Louis:    All right, well that’s a great note to end on also. So John, if people want to contact you or contact IA what’s the best way to do that?

John:     You can reach me on Twitter at John_Woodall and if you’d like to follow me there. For IAS, www.iarchive.com will give you all the contact details you need and I’ll leave it at that.

Louis:    All right, that’s terrific. We’ll put that into the show notes on the revenueassociates.biz site. Thank you for joining us today John. This was just as insightful as I hoped it would be.

John:     Well good. I’m glad it was a good use of your time because that’s always my benchmark for ‘was that worth it’ is. If somebody got value out of something I did then it was a good day. So if you got value out of this and other people do, then I’m very happy to have participated. Thank you for inviting me to join.

Louis:    Yeh, well I think a lot of people will get value out of this. So as I do with all guests, I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation.

John:     Thank you.

Louis:    Sounds like you have some active marketers on your team, they might get one or two bits of value from it, too.

John:     Excellent.

Louis:    So if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or another app, and you found this 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.