Transcript

Louise Cooke:    You don’t very often get an opportunity to build everything from scratch, right? Normally you go into an organization and they have some kind of program, some kind of PRM, some kind of MDS you know all the things that are kind of components of, you know, deal registration components of a channel program and we didn’t have anything.

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

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

Today I’m talking with Louise Cooke, VP at BigID. Louise previously has had senior channel positions at Cylance, Accuvant, Integralis and LogLogic. She has been recognized with a CRN woman of the Channel Award and the Cylance partner program, received a CRN five star rating.

Louise – welcome to the podcast!

Louise:  Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.

Louis:    As will become even clearer when we talk a bit more, you’re from England originally.

Louise:  I am yes.

Louis:    And you worked in sales and in the channel in Europe for over a decade I believe before me coming to the US?

Louise:  Yes, I did. I’ve been stateside for about 12 years now, so yeah, I haven’t lost the accent obviously, although every now and again, every now and again it sounds a little antipodean but yeah. Still keep holding the accent because it is money over here, right. Everyone remembers you when you’ve been on a call with them, so it’s kind of handy.

Louis:    And where are you located now?

Louise:  I’m in Denver, Colorado. Yeah. We always like to say right in the middle, but it’s not really right in the middle, but it’s a good spot if you’ve got, you know, trying to get to major locations.

Louis:    Yeah, the mile-high city.

Louise:  Exactly. Yeah. Mile High and a hundred degrees today actually. So yeah.

Louis:    Yeah, you’re sending that to us in Boston. That’s going to be what it’s going to be like this weekend.

Louise:  Yeah, that’s what I hear. And that’s a very traditional English person thing to do though, is to manage to find a way to talk about the weather at the beginning of every conversation. So you’re welcome.

Louis:    So please tell me about your career path and what brought you to the US and what brought you to where you are today in your channel work?

Louise:  Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because some of it is not necessarily how I kind of foresaw my career going, but as you said earlier, I was in direct sales for both resellers and manufacturers in the UK. And then when I relocated over to North America, I basically lost my network, my network of people that I sold into. And then I obviously didn’t want to leave the industry because it’s you know, driving as it was even then. So I was kind of looking around saying, well I do know a lot of manufacturers, so it kind of took me on a path when I was working at Integralis in North America, to take on a role that was basically managing that kind of vendor partner. So kind of like a channel management role but in reverse for a reseller and from there it led to a couple of other opportunities and then I really lucked out I think is probably the only way to describe it when I moved to Cylance.

It was people that I’ve known from my Accuvant day that had gone over there early on and they wanted someone to come in and do some channel work and I was just very blessed to be with, one of the I think fastest growing startup at the time on that kind of race to get to massive revenue. And so kind of grew with the company, was very fortunate to have good mentorship from Didi Dayton, who I’m sure many people listening to this know from a channel leadership persona who was always very, very gracious with guidance and things like that.

So when I kind of finished my four-year stint at Cylance, just as [inaudible 00:04:05] acquisition happened, it seemed like a good time to spring off and do something else. To really just come to a company like BigID is really in a very similar situation to Cylance was when I joined with, you know, early-stage startup, but with great success, but in a great position to be able to do something really exciting in the channel. So I was brought on board to run the global channel partners for Big ID.

So it’s an interesting challenge having to, not just around North America but have that global reach, and it’s not just prioritization but it’s, you know, looking at the markets that aren’t necessarily doing as well as others that need a little bit more care and attention and trying to do that with a small, very small team. But a lot of people that will pitch in, right. So they may not necessarily be dedicated people within the business right now to do specific things, but there’s people that can help out with whatever it is that you need to do. And as having been here now I think just over four and a half months, five months almost, it was definitely a good career move from my point of view for sure. I think I answered like three questions there. You’ve asked me a simple question and I just went off. It’s just the way it is.

Louis:    No, that was very good. So what does BigID do?

Louise:  So we’re in the data privacy space, which means a lot of things to different people. Privacy is one of those catch all phrases, but really what we’re looking at is privacy automation. It’s all about knowing what data you have before you can kind of make a plan to know what to do with it. So with the heralding of GDPR, which we’ve had for a year or so now, and also new laws coming out like CCPA and various other ones around the world and around the country that are coming into law, it becomes more and more important to understand what your data is.

But also to be able to correlate that back to an individual, so that you can respond to things like access requests, right. So consumers themselves are able to go to an organization saying, you know what data of mine have you got and you know, do you actually have permission to have that data? So it’s a very, a very hot space. I mean, it’s a little bit different from the security space that I was in before. There’s been a tiny bit of a learning curve from that perspective. But yeah, it’s kind of bridging a gap between IT and business and security. So it’s definitely a business need because there’s a legal side to it, but also it touches all of IT and everyone’s data. So yeah, it’s definitely an interesting space.

Louis:    BigID is a venture back company and I guess you’ve raised over $96 million in venture funding since being founded just three years ago. So your partner program at BigID is new, you’ve just launched it. What went into you developing the channel strategy?

Louise:  So that’s a great question, and it is, I mean, when you say launched, it’s almost launched is where I’m going with it. It’s, yeah, it’s kind of there or thereabouts.

Louis:    So you’re in all the planning and strategy and preparation phase right now?

Louise:  Exactly. So we are, so we, you know, it takes, it’s funny when you, you don’t very often get an opportunity to build everything from scratch, right. Normally you go into an organization and they have a, some kind of program, some kind of PRM, some kind of MDS, you know all the things that, the kind of components of, you know, deal registration components of a channel program and we didn’t have anything. So all of our business in the 18 months since we started shipping a product has been through consulting the big four, for example. So we didn’t have a way of transacting with reseller partners. Luckily drawing on a lot of the experience that I had at Cylance and other places, we kind of put various different pillars in place of what needed to be done. So there was putting together what the program would look like, what would make it easy for people to do business with us.

So that meant going out and looking at all kinds of different PRM manufacturers, right. So looking at different portals, what it was that we wanted to achieve with that, looking at deal registration and how we want you to, not only implement that internally but also then have a public face or a partner-facing portal that helps us measure how well we were doing in that respect. Looking at pricing, how we were, you know, discounts, all the important stuff, right. What training looked like. And one big question which took us a little while was what to call the program. Obviously that was a big starting point because you can’t have a program without a name, which we came up with. We’ve called our program ‘The Momentum Partner Program’, just because it seemed pretty apt in my mind that it was, you know, something that we were gaining momentum as a company and we wanted to kind of have that image to our partners as well that we were gaining that and they could gain it with us to find success jointly.

Louis:    One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because you’re launching this new program, brand new program, and I think in a lot of software companies that don’t have someone with your level of experience, they don’t realize how complex it is to launch a channel program. They sometimes may think, oh you know, yeah, that’d be great if other people were reselling our software. That’s terrific. So this must’ve involved a lot of research and thinking on your side and also a lot of conversations at the senior level of the company.

Louise:  Yeah, it did. And it was interesting. The research, I mean research comes in all different guises, right. So there was obviously, you know, looking online for portals and I was listening to a podcast, I think it was on the channel [inaudible 00:09:38] I think it was Rob Spear or someone like that was interviewing another channel chief or something. And they mentioned a product that they were using. So I was like, huh, that’s interesting. Let’s go and have research around that. But also I’m really very lucky to have a very helpful and happy to share peer group within the security space and I guess now the data space a little bit more, where I’ve got a lot of people that I can turn to and say, Hey, what do you use? What works for you? What was more challenging? What did you think worked best. Any kind of pitfalls that you can kind of throwback to me that I need to be wary of.

So you know I’m always very happy to help people when they ask me questions of, you know, how I’ve done certain things, and in the same way I’m always very keen to ask other people what experiences they’ve had with programs, or just how to manage people or to how to manage systems and things like that. So I think just having that openness within the industry has been very helpful.

We have a piece I think that for just from a research perspective, it does take time, right. Because if you imagine you’re looking, I think we looked at three or four different PRM systems. So everyone you had to have a demo and it wasn’t just, they weren’t just demoing to me, it was the people that had to get involved internally was Ops people, our sales force team, and when I say team it’s one person right now because we are a startup, but you know, poetic license. We had marketing involved, you know, there was other people from an alliance’s perspective on our sides that would have been put into that portal as it became live.

You know, there were many different stakeholders, but just running it from a project management perspective, you needed to find time when everyone was available for an hour or whatever it was to do a demo. And then we saw three or four, five maybe demos and then we had discussions internally and you know, then you’re responding to people. So yeah, it’s not a simple, oh we’ll have a program then and that’s it, there’s a lot of thought that needs to go into it. And also, I think the other thing too, and you touched on it in the question having to speak to executives within the business.

It’s not just saying, well this is my vision for what the partner program looks like, but what does that really mean to anyone, right. So it’s has different meaning to the salespeople, to the ops people to finance right. You know, just understanding the difference between having one discount structure to another, and the need for distribution in certain regions and not the [inaudible 00:12:03] in others, having different types of partners in different regions as well. So where we might not have feet on the street in, for example, Australia or somewhere like that, would we put an agent type person in place. Would we have a distributor that could go and look for new partners in certain areas that we didn’t have as much expertise in.

So there’s lots of questions that come up and lots of things that you kind of need to consider, but yeah, time-consuming and complicated, it’s not just a simple, you know, flick a switch and it’s on, in the same way taking on partners isn’t like that right. It’s not just, you know, if we all got rich by signing up partners, you know, I probably wouldn’t need to work, but that’s not the case right. There’s a lot of work that needs to go on afterwards.

Louis:    Yeah. So part of the strategy must be an ideal partner profile. What’s that look like at BigID? What’s your ideal partner look like?

Louise:  That’s a great question. And you know, I think because BigID is pretty unique in as much as we talk to the CESO type persona, we talk to the chief data officer, we talk to the CIO and we talk to legal, right. So we kind of transcend all those various different personas within a company. There isn’t really one ideal partner. I mean it could be, an ideal partner could be a security reseller, right. A pure play security person who has deep relationships with the CESO and [inaudible 00:13:30] and is an influencer in that respect. Or it could be, it could be a firm of consultants that deal in the legal industry, right, because they’re then talking legal ease into that side of the business that can talk more about the risk. It’s hard to say what a perfect or ideal partner really looks like because it could take on lots of different guises.

And I think because we’re not kind of being super specific about all of the type of partners that we want, it leaves us open a little bit more to different opportunities. So you know, we’ve had different types of consulting partners reach out, different types of resellers, people that you wouldn’t necessarily have known from a security space, but they’re playing with some of our technology partners, in the privacy and data space.

Previous companies it’s been like oh, well if you’re a security partner and you’ve got, you know, you deal with these types of accounts then you’re perfect kind of thing. It’s not quite so simple and straightforward unfortunately. But yeah, because I think otherwise we would narrow down the field a little bit too much for ourselves and we probably miss some opportunities.

Louis:    It sounds like the shadow channel, the so-called shadow channel is a key part of your strategy also that not all of your partners are going to be transacting and implementing, that some are going to be refers or influencers?

Louise:  Correct. Yeah, and which again is kind of interesting. There will be certain partners that, because of the type of business that they have, whether it’s a consulting business is generally the case where they are giving us, they’re kind of taking us into different end-users and referring our solution to those end users. And working with us on deals, but they wouldn’t necessarily take the business on their paper. So yeah it’s a slightly different way of looking at the channel. But it’s definitely yeah, an interesting dynamic because there’s lots of people out there that have very good relationships with end-users that aren’t necessarily resellers right. So we’re just trying to figure out how that’ll work. But yeah, it’s definitely a different look from other companies I’ve been at.

Louis:    So a lot of the recommendations for you on LinkedIn, talk about your great contacts and you’ve already mentioned how useful that is to be able to chat with people, colleagues at other companies and get recommendations for software and so forth. So will your personal contacts be a major source of new BigID partners initially or is that not where that comes into play?

Louise:  Absolutely. What’s the point of having a network if you’re not going to use it right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean it always does. And even if the, you know, I’ve talked to one partner that I’ve known for a long time and just said, you know, we had the conversation and just, I kind of gave the senior the pitch and all that kind of stuff, and they were like, I just don’t think it’s right for us. But then they turned around and said, but I know there’s another company that we do some partnering with that probably is down that street a little bit more.

So yeah, I think you’re foolish not to use your network right. I think for all kinds of things. And the other interesting thing that I found too is that your network grows. Every conversation you have with your network grows, leads you to someone else, to another conversation that you can have about something that may not necessarily be directly helpful for you right now, but it could be for someone else in the business or it could be for someone else that you know. I connected with someone this week interestingly enough and we had a good conversation and it kind of got to the end of the conversation and it wasn’t anything that her or I were actually going to be working together on, but it was someone else I introduced her to. It was an alliances piece within BigID that was going to be helpful for someone else and she was passing it over to their person within their business. Yeah I mean I think network and contacts has always been a big way that I’ve been successful in my career and will obviously continue to do that.

Louis:    Given your deep channel experience, how have you seen the channel change, especially in the past three or four years? And I’m wondering how that may have impacted the structure or the strategy for your partner program that you’re launching at BigID.

Louise:  Yeah, and it has changed, right. I mean, I think we’ve seen a lot of consolidation everywhere, right, even in North America and in Europe as well specifically. So companies that, you know, you had channel managers that knew a specific partner really, really well and then they get bought out by someone else. So I think it’s that, the merger and acquisition of various different companies around the globe has made it more challenging in some respects to deal with companies. I mean, just look at the NTT, they’ve kind of turned everything under that umbrella now.

So whereas before you had, you were working with two or three different business units underneath that umbrella and now everything’s kind of under one, it adds some complexity. But it should in the end, I think the evolution is going to happen, in the same way that we’ve seen it with Optiv right, when Acumont and FishNet came together, there was some challenges at the beginning, but now they’ve got it sorted out, so it’s actually easier to work with and navigate around than they were. We’ve seen the same in Europe as well, where companies are being bought sometimes by North American organizations who want to expand their footprint, but other times by the European companies just to make themselves bigger. That’s going to change.

I think resellers in general from my perspective have become more of a value add purely because they’ve seen the writing on the wall in as much as they can make a certain percentage of margin on products. But being able to add services specific sometimes around manufacturers products, but then services that are more geared to helping the end-user in the long run. So managed services, kind of presales, I don’t know, vulnerability and those kinds of risk assessment type services. So really building out those kinds of assets for themselves rather than relying on vendors to do a lot of that work. But I think resellers in general have become smarter because they’ve realized that, and it’s probably parlance [inaudible 00:19:19] from you know, 10, 15 years ago, but you know shifting 10 isn’t going to make anyone, you know, that’s not going to get your retirement very quickly as a reseller. So I think they can sort of see [inaudible 00:19:26] the way to two success is around services.

And I think the other thing that we’ve seen change, which has been kind of interesting is the diversification. So partners that were, that just sold networking software or hardware before, have said, well, you know, actually there’s maybe some money to be made in security. And I think we’re seeing that with privacy and data security as well now as we kind of move forward too. But yeah, I think we’re definitely seeing companies that were purely networking partners before branch out and have started security practices.

And kind of going back to the first point, they may have done that through acquiring another reseller or they could have just started practices and channeling and built them from scratch. But I think we’ve seen those kinds of changes.

So basically, I mean, I think in answer to your question and how that’s really affected how we’re building the strategy is that kind of what I said before, we’re not closing our doors to any specific types of partners. Because there are some that, talked to a few people recently and they’re like, well, we’re just getting started on this privacy path because they’ve seen legislation come into play and you know, like all good business people, right they’re going to follow the money. So if they can see that there’s money to be made in data privacy, then maybe building a specialization around that is a good way to move forward.

Louis:    So is this a global program, right out of the box or are you focusing in just like North America or Europe or where are you focusing initially?

Louise:  No, we’re going global with this. It makes sense for us to do it everywhere. We’ve made it, I was going to say simple enough. We’ve made it streamlined enough that it will fit with partners everywhere. So our focus is really North America, EMEA, mostly the European part of that as opposed to the Middle East just now and then Asia Pac and Latin America. So yeah, we’re taking it global, straight off.

Louis:    Okay. So you won’t be sleeping for the 6 or 12 months?

Louise:  Yeah, I don’t plan to.

Louis:    Does GDPR drive in Europe? Does that help drive demand for BigID?

Louise:  It does, and it drives demands in as much as it drives awareness and it drives people in wanting to understand a little bit more about, you know, what they need to do to be compliant. We’ve also seen a couple of fines this week around British Airways and Marriott as well about where they kind of fell down a little bit on their compliance. So I think that also is a driver. Like I hate to say it like that but again, it’s following the money, wherever the money is kind of thing, whether it’s from fines or whatever, but yeah, it’s definitely a driver.

In North America we’re seeing GTPA being a big driver as well as the California Privacy Act. And I think we’ll continue to see that in North America as various different states go to implement and their own laws around privacy then it becomes more and more complex, because it’s not just like the with CCPA you don’t have to, it’s not the companies in California, it’s that it’s dealing with anyone in California. So a retailer for example, might be selling something to someone in California so they need to be compliant and then very much coming from Colorado, the analogy I like to use, it’s a bit like the Marijuana Laws right. It’s different state to state. There isn’t a national law around that, and they’re all a little bit different. So what works or what is put in place in California, it’s going to be slightly different the one that comes out in New York and there’s already one in Washington. And there’s a number of states that have laws on the docket to or act on it yeah. On the docket you come into Law later on if you’re in early next year as well. So it’s becoming more complex.

Louis:    Yeah, well that’s how GDPR affects a lot of American companies too, because even if they’re not located in the EU, if they’re doing business over there and have an online presence, they have to be following those regulations.

Louise:  Yeah, exactly and it brings another good point. I was talking to a partner in India the other night, and he was saying as well that India has a new law that’s coming in, in the next couple of months or so. It’s coming online and not only is it a big economy anyway it’s a very fast-growing economy, but also a lot of companies offshore data there. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that all plays out as well. But I think that’s a really interesting opportunity in that market as well.

Louis:    Yeah. Well at some point there has to be in the US a national version of GDPR to when they around to it.

Louise:  Exactly.

Louis:    You mentioned already some of the technologies you were looking at like PRM. So what do you think are the most important technologies for BigID to have out of the box and what might you be adding on later on?

Louise:  So we’re a Salesforce user and I think the key piece there has been, and again, this is something that you kind of learn the hard way a little bit at other organizations is we’ve been very lucky that our sales force admin and person internally has been very good. So our base level from a Salesforce perspective, all our roles and responsibilities within the software itself was set up really well to start with. So that stops a lot of the headaches that you’re going to have further down the line. So Salesforce is the key to that side, from a customer CRM perspective, we’ve opted to go with a PRM from a company called Magentrix. They’ve been very helpful, very easy to work with to date, and we’re kind of going through the launch of that portal right now.

With regards to other technologies that we use, I mean internally we use HubSpot to disseminate leads internally. We’re in a very fortunate position in as much as we have inbound inquiries, which is nice. So when they’re starting to say, where are the leads, you can actually kind of give them to them, which is in a very fortunate position because it doesn’t happen very often these days. So those are the kind of, those are the key ones that we have implemented from a partner perspective that kind of covers the majority of the interfaces that we use.

Being a small or smallish, I should say just ever a hundred people, organization, which we’re trying to use you know, I’m not necessarily going say cutting edge, but we use a lot of software as a service applications internally, which seems to make our life, I think they make our life easier most of the time right. Those various applications like Bamboo that we use internally for sharing content on social media, which I’ve used other applications in the past, but this one seems very, very straightforward and very intuitive to work with. And that’s certainly a good way of disseminating information out. We use LinkedIn quite heavily at BigID and anyone who goes and looks online and follows BigID will certainly agree with me there. But it’s, you know, it’s an effective way to get to a lot of people.

I know I posted something on LinkedIn yesterday about trying to recruit someone in Noumea and I looked this morning when I woke up and you know, already I think it was something like 650 odd people had viewed it already within a few hours of me posting it. Yeah. And it’s not that I’ve got some massive network, but you know, I have a network that reads stuff when you put it out there. So I was going to say an intelligent network is just a [inaudible 00:26:27] way, LinkedIn [inaudible 00:26:29].

Louis:    Isn’t that a technical term and an intelligent network?

Louise:  It is. There you go. Yes exactly, yes. But yeah. So yeah, those are the key things that we use anyway. So I just digressed a little bit there.

Louis:    And you’ll have a portal at launch?

Louise:  We will, yes. That’s all in the plan, that we’ll have a portal at launch, which will be great right. I think it’s good to have, building from the ground up, having the foundation of all this in place at the beginning makes it, it just makes it easier to do business with us. And that’s something that I learnt from other people too that the easier we are to do business with the more people are going to want to do business with us. I mean it helps that we have a great product in a market that’s trending, but you know, if we’re easy to deal with as well so that deal registration is simple, requesting Coop funds and things like that are simple, then it just makes everyone’s life a little bit easier.

Louis:    Yeah, I hear that over and over from the people that I’m talking to that their portal and reducing friction, making it easy for partners through the portal is just the most critical thing. And even more so in the last 18 months or so, making it easy to have, get pricing register deals and so forth.

Louise:  Yeah, exactly. Well, because if you look at it from their perspective and as much as I would like to think that BigID is the only technology these people are selling, it’s not right. I mean for the majority of resellers they have a large portfolio of solutions that they sell. So they’re pumping out lots of quotes, lots of deal registering is happening and things like that. So the less friction the better really just to make, it just makes everyone’s life a little bit easier, which is what we’re trying to do.

Louis:    So I’m going to ask you two questions, variations of questions that I ask when I’m hiring someone. First, what’s the channel program that you’ve done that you think has been especially successful? One that you’re especially proud of? It could be before BigID?

Louise:  I think it has to be the one that Cylance. We were in a very fortunate position early on with having some very loyal partners at the beginning and obviously it grew as the company became more successful. But I think there was a lot of input from a team that was pretty experienced and it wasn’t just one person driving it. You know, we had a great worldwide channel leader in Didi, and the rest was a supporting team, although there weren’t very many of us, the input kind of came to build the channel program out and, you know, made it very fair. You know, we have to start looking at things like deal registration and discounts and nonstandard pricing and things like that. That’s part of every day. So you have to have an ethos behind the channel program that everyone stands behind and I really believe that at Cylance we had that for sure in spades.

Louis:    Okay. So when I say channel program in this next question, it doesn’t have to be like the entire program. It could be a particular campaign or something, a particular aspect of it, but what’s a program or a campaign or an aspect of something that you were doing that wasn’t successful, that didn’t perform as well as you had hoped and why do you think that was?

Louise:  That’s a good question. That threw me off there, I was all ready to tell you about my favorite one and then you went with wasn’t successful. I think you know what I’m going to go way, way back, and I think it was a program that we ran a long time ago at Blue Coat and the reason it wasn’t successful was because we were asking partners to work outside of their comfort zone. I think we’d acquired another company for basically for some of their channel partners, and we wanted them to add Blue Coat into their mix. So they weren’t used to selling it and they didn’t really grasp how to sell it, and I guess we didn’t enable them well enough to do it. You have to be so cognizant of what partners are good at, and different partners are good at different things. So that was the program that really didn’t work very well.

But just to kind of talk about that a little bit more, I think you have to be just aware of what it is that you’re asking the partner to do and take responsibility as the manufacturer, as the owner of that technology to create the market. I don’t think there’s very many, if any resellers right now that are going to create a market for you. So as a startup specifically and even bigger vendors that bring out, you know, new technology and things, I think the onuses always has to be on the vendor to create the buzz to enable partners as well as they can and to kind of lead by example when you’re introducing something new.

Whether it’s something that’s a slightly different way of looking at things or it’s a different technology with new terminologies like we had at Cylance, right. We were probably the first people to start talking about AI and ML and then partners didn’t understand what it was and we were, we did a really very good job at the beginning of creating that market. There was a lot of buzz from a marketing perspective. They’d heard the name Cylance even if they didn’t really know what we did. And I think lessons learned, right, at BigID I think we’re doing a good job of getting our name out there, going to different types of events, different types of shows, whether it’s a privacy show around with organizations like IAPP or whether it’s Black Hat in a couple of weeks time or RSA. Or whether it’s technology events with the likes of SAP, who not only are an investor in us, but we’re also signing agreements with them from a reselling perspective. You have to understand what your role is as a vendor as well as asking a lot from a partner as well. That was a very long-winded answer to quite a simple question, but I think it’s, you know, it’s a good point to make.

Louis:    No, I think that was very valuable, and it kind of rolls into what I was going to ask about next, which is, as a new company, you’re only three years old, you don’t have the brand awareness that some big players do and how do you keep mind share among partners?

Louise:  That’s a good question. And I hope, no I was going to say, if you’ve got an answer to that, you know I think it’s, [inaudible 00:32:26]. No, I think it is that mind share. It’s having the ability in all kinds of different ways of punching above your weight, right. As a startup again, it kind of goes back to your network in as much as having, knowing lots of people affords you introductions, which affords you getting your foot in the door and being able to make introductions with from a sales team perspective for example. But it is kind of keeping that momentum going. [inaudible 00:32:52] partner program [inaudible 00:32:55], but keeping that momentum going and keeping mind sharing, keep in front of mind. And that has to be done by activity, right. It’s working on deals together with partners, showing success, being present, and also being, showing innovation from a product perspective as well. So, not just kind of sitting on our laurels and saying we’ve done this bit, you know, announcing things that are relevant to partners, continuous education, all of that kind of stuff.

But it’s not easy right because you know, we are a small company, we don’t have hundreds of people. The whole idea and whole ethos around why you would engage with resellers for example, is that they have big sales forces right. It’s that classic, the channel is a Salesforce multiplier. But the challenge you have coming from the other side is that if we’ve got 10 salespeople compared to your 400, how do you engage? So it’s kind of, I was going to use the word Cherry picking. It kind of is almost Cherry picking saying, feed the customers that we think will be successful at in doing that, smart account mapping. And not just for the sake of it, but just, you know, saying, well we’ve had some input X companies come to us, BigID say that they’re interested, do you know people there, can we walk in together right.

So it’s definitely a big, big challenge. It gets easier as you get a little bit bigger I think as long as you’re continuing to do the right thing, if you have the right personnel that can manage relationships and that can have good communications out. So good communications from marketing, be it in webinars or newsletters or LinkedIn updates or updates on the partner portal or whatever. But yeah, it’s just grind. There is, if there was an easy button, I would have pressed it a while ago. Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s just grind.

Louis:    So you were saying that you have a pretty active marketing group and inbound leads, so do those get turned over to your direct sales team or are you generating leads that are going to go to partners also?

Louise:  A little bit of both, to be honest. Yeah. Depending on what it is. I mean, and it’s still early. The idea is that when we have launched the portal, so there’ll be an easy way of propagating leads through that. At the moment I would say in all honesty, they go to our salespeople, they generally get flushed out by some inside salespeople who have business development folk who kind of do a first pass to decipher what the information the other person is looking for, because different people are asking for different information. Some people are end users, some people are consulting partners, some people are students or whatever it is that’s coming in, so you know, not all leads are created equal. But the idea of having all this technology in place is that once we get it all in place and it’s all up and running that we will disseminate leads out to our partners for sure.

Louis:    Okay. So what should I have asked you about that I didn’t? This has been great and we could talk a lot longer, but I was going to say what keeps you up at night, but I’m sure there’s a ton of things that keep you up at night. What should I have asked you about that I didn’t?

Louise:  Yeah just don’t ask me for timelines is always the question to ask or not ask. No, I don’t think there’s anything. I think it’s an exciting time to be a vendor, right. I think its perfect time to talk to you as we’re pushing out our new programming, and getting our kind of feet under the deck as it were from a global perspective and seeing success in lots of different areas. But in all honesty, no vendor can do it on their own, right. So the idea of having a channel is so that we can further our success but do it quicker than we would be able to if we suddenly decided to hire 100 salespeople, which I don’t think is necessarily ever going to happen.

So we’re trying to build a program that makes us easy to work with so that we can all see success, right. It’s that kind of race to get to, you know, 50 million or a hundred million or whatever it is as an organization. We want to be able to look back and show the results and be able to measure the results, to measure our partners and how our relationships are going and all that kind of good stuff. So no I don’t think there’s anything you really missed. As to what keeps me up at night? Conference calls mostly I’d have to say. But yeah, there’s always things you worry about.

So remember to do certain things and did I miss anything, and most of the time, you know, there’s reminders in all kinds of places, right. But yeah, if it’s not in the calendar, it’s not going to happen kind of thing. But yeah, no, I think we’re in a good spot just because the executive team and the founders have recognized what they need to do to make the company successful and channels is a major part of that and we’re investing in that as an organization. So yeah, I feel like we’re definitely, we’re on the right path and as we continue to expand and grow as a company, we’ll keep moving down the right path with the right tech in the background of it and the right people managing it. So. Yeah, it’s all good.

Louis:    So one other thing before we get to the, kind of the last couple of questions, just from a legal point of view, regulations everything. How complex is it to launch a partner program in many countries and many regions simultaneously?

Louise:  You know, that is something that is a, I wouldn’t say it’s an issue, but we have to, be cognizant of the different countries. Dealing with people in North America is different from having agreements with people in Turkey or France or India or wherever. So we’ve got a really good legal team who is very patient with us. It’s probably the best way of answering that question. Yeah, I mean that’s probably the best way of putting it, but yeah. You need to be aware of, you know, local laws in the same way you would be when you employ people in different areas, and different regions. It’s just having good people again, makes a big difference.

Louis:    So the business world and the channel world is changing very rapidly. How do you keep up, any particular podcasts or publications, blogs, websites, events, other things that you find especially valuable?

Louise:  Yeah, I think I’m a big LinkedIn user and all kinds of stuff from LinkedIn. I mean I read CRN and all the usual stuff that I think everyone reads. I think just reading the news to be honest is, you know, the business news just keeps you up to date with what’s going on with pertinent information around what things that make a difference to your world and being reasonably well rounded.

Although having said that, don’t get me wrong, I totally scroll through Facebook as well first thing in the morning to get all my kind of interesting bits and snippets so that I’ve always got something to talk to people about.

So yeah, I mean I think those are the ones and, you know, again, I mean I’m forever having conversations with peers, right. I think you can’t just, and I feel like I’ve mentioned tons, I just sound like I talk to people all the time, which actually is kind of my job right, from a relationship management perspective. But yeah, just listening, not just talking to people right. So just listening to what other people are doing and talking about pains and successes and things like that is always a good source of information. But I think, I’m not looking anywhere that normal people don’t, there’s no secret book that I’ve read to the success in channel kind of way. I think it’s just paying heed to people that you know that are doing the right thing and learning from them as well. And never being afraid to ask questions too. I think it’s always, I’ve always been a big question asker of people, even when you think you know a lot of stuff, but there’s always a ton of stuff you don’t know. So yeah, just not being afraid to ask questions of people.

Louis:    All right. So how can people contact you if someone wants to get in touch with you?

Louise:  LinkedIn would be by far the best way to contact me for sure.

Louis:    Alright.

Louise:  [inaudible 00:40:25] on public yeah. So yeah, louisecooke with an E, don’t forget the E.

Louis:    Right. And is there like an email address or some place for the momentum program yet?

Louise:  So it’s partners@bigid.com would be the place to go.

Louis:    All right, great. All right. I’ll put those into the show notes on the revenueassociate.bis website. So thank you for joining us today, Louise.

Louise:  Thanks very much. We could have talked for hours. I feel like this is what I talk about all the time. So yeah, I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Louis:    Well with you being so busy right now with the launch of this program I really appreciate it. So I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book as I do all guests in appreciation.

Louise:  Thank you.

Louis:    And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or another app, and you found the podcast interesting and useful, please leave a review that will help other people learn about the podcast too. Thank you for listening to the Software Channel Partner Podcast, and please subscribe and listen to future episodes.