Transcript

Rob Rae (introduction): Go to your vendors, ask them for two things. Number one, what’s your roadmap look like? Show me innovation over the next three, four, five years. So I’m talking to my end users about what innovation in my business and their business is going to look like. And the second thing to look for is What can you do to help me grow my business now? As a vendor, I should not just be providing technology. I should also be providing you support around — and help and training — around that technology, and not just tech but sales and marketing.

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 some of the leaders in software partner programs to learn more about what’s working now. I’m Louis Gudema, your host. Today I’m very happy to welcome Rob Rae, Vice President of Business Development at Datto, to the podcast. Datto has over 14,000 managed service providers — MSP — partners worldwide with over 500,000 customers, so it is a large scale partner program. We’ll talk shortly about how to grow a program to that size. Before Datto, for six years Rob was Director of Partner Development and Operations at Level Platforms, and has inside sales experience as well earlier in his career. Rob was named a Channel Partners Channel Futures Channel Influencer of the Year in 2018  — how about that for getting channel into one sentence three times. Don’t tell my college writing instructor. Welcome to the podcast, Rob.

Rob:       Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Louis:    And I have to compliment you on your accessibility. I literally reached out to you yesterday morning about being on the podcast and here we are talking the very next day.

Rob:       I think you’re really lucky. I think our stars aligned because I think the next available slot for both you and I was like months out, so worked out really well.

Louis:    Yeah, well I’m glad it did. It did and in one of my VP of business development positions several years ago I responded to an inquiry from a new prospect in less than five minutes and she said either you’re incredibly responsive or you have nothing to do. And I assured her that we had plenty to do, but that we are also incredibly responsive. And I’m sure that’s the same for you too. So thanks.

Rob:       Absolutely. Well, I was in Germany yesterday. Nashville tomorrow. And in Connecticut today. So let’s go with the latter.

Louis:    So you’re from Canada originally?

Rob:       Yeah, Toronto born and raised, but I moved down to the U.S. to be closer to Datto when I joined them five years ago. So right now based out of Connecticut.

Louis:    All right, terrific. Can you tell me more about how you moved through your career, to eventually head up partner programs and, and what do you like about it?

Rob:       I spent the first, actually, 12 years of my career in the finance industry, nowhere near IT, and kind of dabbled a little bit in IT there, but more so on the sales side. Like I was one of the first ones to actually join the bank that I was working at — to join the Internet banking team. This was back when we used ups to ship disks out so you could actually load the software on so you could use — like basically transfer money between your checking and savings account was pretty much all the functionality it had. But that was internet banking way back then ;that makes me sound old. I don’t like that at all!

Louis:    This was back in the days of getting AOL CDs or discs in the mail over and over again.

Rob:       Yes, exactly. When you had to spell out the “http”, you know, for everybody; that kind of thing.

Louis:    Right, exactly.

Rob:       So, I actually discovered a really, really smart kid that worked for me and you know, and he kind of bounced around careers and he actually ended up leaving the bank and joining Compaq Computers. And he called me up probably about a month later and said they’re looking for a good sales manager. They want to hire somebody outside of IT to come and manage sales. Cause they were running it just as technical people wanting to run sales teams. So I applied, got the job and then: that was in 2000. Started learning about the world of IT. We got acquired by HP at the time. Spent a couple more years there and then what happened was the solution providers started dealing with these big vendors going direct, and cutting their margins.

So the solution providers, the channel that I was working with, started more or less selling services. And this is where the birth of managed services came in. So the next logical step was, let’s look for a vendor that’s in the managed services space. We can get out of the hardware game and go to somewhere that’s emerging and growing. And of course you want to deal in software rather than in hardware because it’s much easier to sell and you can download it right away. So this is where I’ve found Level Platforms. We developed a remote monitoring technology. So something that’s fundamental to delivering services as being able to monitor and manage and report on end user sites. What’s going on, you know, where are you getting alerts from? What needs to be looked at, what needs attention, that kind of thing. So, that was the next logical step.

We sold Level Platforms in 2013 to AVG technologies, which you are probably very familiar with — the big anti virus company out of Europe. And at that particular time, because managed services, I’d spent a lot of time there. We spend a lot of time educating, you know, the traditional resellers on becoming MSPS, moving away from break-fix and one-time revenue into recurring revenue and building out offerings and stacks around services. So Datto was one of these emerging backup vendors back in the day. And there they chose real early in their startup to go exclusively with managed service providers. And because myself and a handful of other people were kind of really pushing the education piece around MSPs, that was kind of a no brainer. Fit really well with what my career path was. Fit really well with what their needs and wants were. And that’s where in essence I have been able to build out the MSP strategy for Datto over the last five-plus years.

Louis:    So those MSP partners are 100% of Datto revenue.

Rob:       Correct.

Louis:    So, for people who aren’t familiar with Datto, why don’t you tell us what it is and what the software does.

Rob:       Yeah, it’s a neat little story. Datto was started about 10 years ago by a gentleman by the name of Austin McChord. Austin had just graduated, barely graduated from college and he started Datto. Basically, he’s a really smart — for back then a kid, because he was only 22 — really smart kid. Lots of really good technical and coding talent. And basically took a look at technologies that were available to the enterprise space but not available to the SMB space and created basically a better mouse trap and a cheaper mouse trap for the SMB space. He grew the business. He started it in his parents’ basement with a credit card loan that he had. He kind of grew it a little bit, you know, a little chunks here and there and he actually discovered the channel. And that’s pretty early.

And then discovered that he didn’t have to sell it or market it. He could get this channel to do it and then he could focus on what he was good at, which is coding and developing. So he did that; grew the business probably to about a couple thousand partners when I joined in 2013. We took our first round of VC in 2013 and that’s when he really wanted to take the business to the next level. So I came on board and developed a really strong channel program and a playbook. And  we spent some money getting the brand and the name out. And as you mentioned off the top, you know, have close to 16,000 MSPs worldwide. And we sold the business to a private equity company a little over a year ago for north of $1.5 billion. So in about five years we were able to grow it from pretty much nothing to, to that amount

Louis:    That’s quite a run. So you’re adding a couple thousand partners a year now.

Rob:       Easy. More than that. Our foundation was backup and disaster recovery. Austin found a way that backup: you know, traditional backup, you take data, you store it in the cloud or a store it on a device and you recover it when you need it. That recovery process — as good as that is — there’s a lot of downtime and waiting for that recovery depending on where the data is, how big the data is, those kinds of things. What Austin created was the ability to eliminate that downtime while you’re recovering. So you don’t have that Wait and we’ll re-image the server. Wait and we’ll put that data back. So people are able to continue to work even in a down state. And you know that’s been massive for MSPs to be able to offer what’s called continuity more so than backup. But we’ve also diversified; we’ve done a few acquisitions over the course of time. Because one of the things that we discovered was that we actually had a really good understanding of the channel of managed service providers and we believe the MSP market was heavily underserved because a lot of vendors either traditionally have sold to resellers or VARs. They haven’t necessarily focused on managed services. Or they sell direct, which of course is anti channel in my mind. So there’s very, very few vendors that were pure MSP.

Well, we understood the MSP market. We had the base, we had the loyalty, we had channel programs. So we acquired a company called Backupify, which was our first acquisition in 2014 that allowed us to do Office 365 backups, so now we could do cloud based backup. We acquired Open Mesh in 2016, which allowed us to get into the networking space. And now we have an MSP-only strategy for access points, switches, routers, the firewalls, those kinds of things.  And then more recently we rolled in Autotask, which is a PSA solution. Basically it’s the ticketing solution: the CRM that an MSP would use to manage its business. And along with that was RMM technology. And then a couple other auxiliary products we’ve developed and created over time. So we actually have quite a few different product areas that we’re really, really good at. All MSP focused and, you know, again, pure channel only.

Louis:    So you must have acquired a lot of MSP relationships when you acquired those companies, too.

Rob:       No, to be honest. Backupify did Google Apps back up and unfortunately Google doesn’t work really well with the MSP channel. So a lot of those were direct relationships. What we did was we acquired them basically to get the engineering talent so we could come up with the Office 365 version, which is MSP friendly. Open Mesh had a channel program, but they also sold direct to end users through Amazon. We eliminated that about a year ago now and now we’re selling it exclusively as Datto Networking through the channel. Period. So you can’t buy our stuff on Amazon anymore or end users can’t buy direct. So a lot of it is also bringing direct products into the actual channel and creating a channel-only strategy.

Louis:    So, since quite a few people who are listening haven’t managed channel programs with anywhere near that scale, what have you learned along the way about scaling up a program to that size?

Rob:       There are a couple of different things. It’s interesting because you know, you, you asked me that question. My instinct is It’s easy.

Louis:    (laughs)

Rob:       I’ve been evolving it and you have to constantly evolve it over the years. And, and a lot of it has to do with, first of all, surrounding yourself with really good people: good people that are understanding of the channel and actually embracing it. I’ll share with you that I’ve worked with vendors in the past that have both channel as well as direct sales and the way they talk about their channels is extremely derogatory. And you know, you can’t have that. You’re all in or all out. Actually one of the things we say around here is you can’t be half pregnant; you either are or you aren’t. So you’re either going to sell direct and focus energies on that or you’re not. And if you’re not, that means you’ve got to treat the channel like you would every other buying customers, which means awesome. Right?

So, you know, for us it’s making sure that you have the right people, the right mentality. But it’s also keeping a pulse on, on what it is. And you know, we’ve been very blessed where we’re focused on the MSP market and the MSP market is focused on the SMB market. So for us that market is big enough. We haven’t been tempted to go direct or go up market or down into the consumer market. We’ve been able to focus on this market and this market is growing significantly and the projected growth over the next five years is even more. It should almost double over the next five years. So for us, it’s making those right bets, it’s getting the right people. And then it’s constantly asking What else can we do and challenging ourselves with what else can we do?

And it’s something that I struggled with. Because joining Datto being that our founder was in his early twenties when I was at that time in my early forties, you know, almost a double his age. And them challenging the traditional way in which we would set up a vendor. We’ve been in the industry for a long time. You know, you set up a vendor, you find a disty, you go to market here, you’d do this, you have funded heads, you pay that, you know. It’s just that you want to integrate with these people and don’t talk to those people. It’s just that they challenged the traditional ways in which we did business. And it’s interesting cause you have to have that kind of open mind in order to be able to evolve quickly and challenge the status quo. And why did we do things the way we did it just because that’s the way we did it is not necessarily the right way. So it’s been really kind of cool that way. A lot of work.

And then I think the last part of that is is checking in with your partners. Like we have a pretty robust partner advisory board, which is also part of my team’s responsibility. And we have ongoing contact with them and an open and honest relationship with them where we can say, Hey, this is what we want to do. And there are times where they tell us it’s brilliant and there’s times they tell us that’s stupid. And you have to be able to, first of all, be able to take that information, use that information, and then make decisions on the direction your business based on that information you’re getting from them. So a combination of a number of different things has kind of allowed us to build it. And as I mentioned, it was seemingly with relative ease.

Louis:    So I’ve talked with people in some partner programs where sometimes maybe 50% of partners generate very little revenue at all. Does the 80/20 rule apply to partners at Datto? Do you have a small percentage of partners who are knocking it out of the park and producing most of the revenue? Or how does that break down?

Rob:       It’s pretty consistent. Same way all the other vendors actually do it. The 80/20 rule is probably a pretty safe one. I think where we get lucky is we are diversified enough that I have, you know, an 80/20 rule on pretty much all of the products that I’ve gotten. It’s not the same 20. So I have the ability to cross-sell and upsell. The other beautiful part about my program is you don’t have to have a massive fleet in order to get the same level of service or commitment that you would if you had a massive fleet. Our support is great. And this is part of being founded by an engineer. Our our tech support is probably the best in the industry. I’d put it up against any other vendor’s tech support team.

Product innovation: We don’t have a ton of flaws or issues or bugs in our product. Again, simply because we are innovators first and the core of the product and the core of the team and the foundation of Datto was all about innovation. So for us, we kind of have a luxury where, my support costs are relatively low as a result of those things. And therefore I can allow somebody to come into the partner program with a single device and sit there for a while and we’ll just wait until you have growth or you need us or whatever that moment is that we can do that. But I would suggest that your 80/20 rule is pretty consistent. I just have a few luxuries around that.

Louis:    One of the things that you said early on is that your founder discovered the channel and realized Oh, can just sell through that; I don’t have to have a sales force. And you made that sound easy, but a lot of companies think that. A lot of companies think, Oh, we’ll just sell, we’ll get some partners and they’ll sell for us and it’ll be easy. And then they discovered there’s an awful lot of partners support and enablement that goes into having a successful partner program. So it’s not quite as easy as just, Oh, let’s sell through channels.

Rob:       No, no, no. I mean, it can be. It’s a decision that you have to make, but then you have to figure out what those channels are. Because there’s a, there’s a lot — and as vendors you get tempted all the time, you know, to maybe squeeze a deal in here, squeeze a deal out there, you know, that kind of thing. We get approached all the time by some larger shops that want to buy direct. They have their own in-house IT team. And there’s business that, as lucrative as it may be, it goes back to that you can’t be half pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. And as soon as you get tempted and take the bite of that apple, you’re done. You’re now not a channel-only organization. And you know, the channel rewards loyalty, it really does. And that’s something that’s been kind of a sacred cow around here at Datto. This is one that, that we won’t slaughter. It’s one that we want to stick with and continue with because all of our growth and all of our success and everything we’ve been able to do. We’ve gone from 50 employees when I joined to about 1600 worldwide now. That is all because of the channel. And how do you bite the hand that feeds you like that? So, you know, for us it was a relatively easy decision back in the day. And then it was done predominantly because an engineer didn’t want to sell and market this stuff and found a channel that could. And it just grew from there. And, and you know, as a strategy,  it’s been an absolutely lucrative one for us. And I think we continue to set that bar really, really high.

And what’s awesome about it is that we see new vendors coming into this space. They want to figure out the managed services space. They tend to come to us first, which, you know, I’m more than happy to share my playbook and and share our strategy and everything like that because I’m really vested into this MSP channel and all in the growth of the channel overall. And, that’s where I think for us it’s been super exciting and I’ll go back to saying again it’s been relatively easy for us.

Louis:    Yes, if you want to reach that massive MSB market, having partners is definitely the way to go. I can remember maybe 20 years ago — oh, actually it’s a little longer than that — but Lotus, before its IBM acquisition, was my biggest client. And they had an annual event down at Disney World, Lotusphere where like 10,000 customers and partners would come and they would have a partner day before the full event. And, uh, there was this event where the CEO would meet with the partners. And Lotus did not have a channel-only strategy. They had direct sales also, and there was like an hour and a half of partners yelling at the CEO about channel conflict, basically. It’s like, why are you trying to take the best opportunities from us? And obviously that’s, that’s not an issue that you, you’ve sidestep that issue entirely.

Rob:       I’ve also experienced that in my career. Compaq was a channel-only organization for hardware way back in the day. And then when we got acquired by HP there were some direct sales; actually, quite a bit of direct sales. And  that was fueled by a lot of the different hardware vendors that were trying to cut margins, get cheap product out there. And how do you do that? You bypass what they perceived as the middle man, which was the channel. And they’re selling hardware that the channel in their mind didn’t add a lot of value in selling hardware. But that’s a huge mistake. It’s a huge mistake, especially if you want to stay relevant in the SMB market. And maybe HP at the time wasn’t interested in the SMB market.

But the SMB market in the United States, as an example, is 96% of all businesses are out there. You start venturing into other areas like Canada and Australia, you’re talking about 98% of the market is considered SMB — less than a thousand seats. You know, this is a massive, massive market. Sure, it’s a lot of little deals, but a lot of the little deals add up to a massive big deal. And the great part about it is now I actually see these large vendors that have been, I don’t want to say abusing the channel, but not treating them properly, not responding to them properly, not necessarily catering to the new needs of the managed service provider versus the traditional reseller. And now they’re trying to figure out how they get into the MSP space and they’re struggling with it. Because legacy is I’m going to, I’m going to sell you a product, you’re going to take your margin, you’re going to go away, and I’m going to continue to work with the end user. And that is not the MSP channel. The MSP channel is, the channel is our customer and we’ll treat them as our partners and give them the tools that they need so that they can go provide support and value and ongoing billing and contract management and all that stuff that they’re actually doing. So it’s a different spin on a new way to do it. But again it’s one that’s been extremely lucrative and one that has massive growth opportunities as time goes on.

Louis:    You mentioned overseas and other countries. And Datto is in — what? – 130 countries now?

Rob:       Actually we just, believe it or not, I don’t know if Antarctic is considered a country. We had a Datto device on every single continent with the exception of Antarctic. Except last week we finally got one in to the South Pole. So let’s call it 131 on seven continents.

Louis:    That’s awesome. But there must be all sorts of challenges in operating in that many different countries, too.

Rob:       Uh, yes and no. Remember what our business model is. Our business model is to work with MSPs. And an MSP is defined for us as a solution provider who is willing to provide support, frontline support, as well as billing to the ultimate end user. And it’s built on a recurring revenue basis. So what I do is I sell my product to the MSP. There is no MSRP. My price list is not available to end users. So the channel and the MSP can add as much margin as they need or want to it and then provide those services to the ultimate end user. So for the end user in essence Datto could be invisible to them. And that’s fine. My customer is the partner, it’s the solution provider. So when they run into problems and need to escalate things, they can contact us.

And that is scalable regardless of what language you’re in, what country you’re in. So what do we need when we go into a new market? We open up a cloud so that you have local backups as well as cloud-based backups with the cloud-based backups are in the region or country that you’re comfortable with storing data in. And sometimes localized language, if necessary. Localized billing, meaning we bill in Canadian dollars for Canadians and Australian dollars for Aussies. We try to do that as much as possible. So just doing some of the little things that MSPs want and need in their markets. But ultimately at the end of the day, they want good technology. They want great support. They need a good price with good margin. That’s it. And that’s what we provide. And whether you’re in Germany or whether you’re in Canada or whether you’re in the United States, it does not matter. As long as you got a vendor that’s willing to do that, the MSPs will sell your stuff.

Louis:    You mentioned pricing there. I saw in one interview where you said Now is the time for partners to be raising their prices.

Rob: (laughs) I did.

Louis:    And the partners all say, What? People are pushing back on price all the time! Why is now the time to raise prices, do you think?

Rob:       Okay. First of all, any consumer, anybody that is going to buy your product is going to complain about price. As consumers, we always want a better price. You go and buy a car, you want a better price. You go and try and swing a deal and get a deal somewhere and some countries are worse than others. IT no different. Then you got to spin it and talk about what it is that you’re actually providing the ultimate end user. And if you think about it and the way IT has evolved — and a lot of the managed service providers have been around for decades — they’ve also seen the days where you had to compete on the same laptop, same spec with 10 other — at that time — resellers. So therefore it was whoever got the best price is going to get the deal. But it’s not about that anymore. Today it’s about the service that you provide, not the product that you actually provide.

Now you think about IT: it used to be pretty simple. I have a server, I have a desktop. There’s really no cloud essential part of it. There’s not a lot of internet conductivity. You maybe have a firewall that’s doing this job, antivirus, anti-spam, anti-malware, and that’s pretty simple. A lot of end users went and they actually could buy and consume these things direct from these vendors or go to Best Buy or purchase this equipment themselves and set it up themselves. Or my cousin Joe, he’s really good with computers so he’s going to set it up for me. But times have changed. Times have changed significantly in just even the last couple of years. Between security, between hackers, ransomware, phishing viruses and scams that are going on every single day. It is significantly worse from a security perspective than ever before. Plus when you factor in cloud technology and how complicated the cloud is for a traditional layman who doesn’t understand IT, now all of a sudden the opportunities has become broadened.

It’s no longer at desktop and a server. You’re now starting to get into SaaS. You’re starting to get into internet conductivity. You’re starting to get into WiFi. People bringing their own devices into environments. People bring viruses into their environments, sharing USB keys, internet safety, all these different types of things. All these different ways that hackers can attack these sites. And the SMBs — as much as we only hear about enterprise shops in the news — the SMBs are the target. Sixty, I think it was our last number said 65% of all targeted attacks are at the SMB market. They don’t make the news because who cares about Bob’s manufacturing company if Bob’s not publicly traded or you know, a brand name like apple or Facebook. So they never make the news. But they are the ones that are under attack more so than large enterprises.

More so because they actually don’t have the ability to protect themselves, and the gazillions of dollars to spend on security. This is why the MSP is essential. Being and making sure that you know the end user sleeps well at night, that they don’t need to worry about this stuff because they don’t have an in-house IT team. The whole idea of managed services that you’re going to outsource this, you’re going to outsource it to me. I’m going to treat it really, really well as if it’s my own. I’m going to stay up to date on everything that you need from a security perspective and you don’t need to worry about it. That’s the value of an MSP. That’s worth a hell of a lot more than what the services we traditionally provided even five, six years ago. This is why I’m saying that this is not the time to be apologizing for price. This is not the time to start undercutting and underbidding each other. If anything, people should be paying a premium for the products and the services that you’re providing these days because they’re more important than ever before.

Louis:    Absolutely. I run into this all the time. The only thing that people are going to negotiate on is price. They’re not going to say do a worse job. They’re not going to say leave me vulnerable: Can you leave me partially vulnerable? The only thing they’re going to negotiate on is price. So sometimes salespeople and others think that’s the only thing that people care about, but that’s actually the only thing they can really negotiate on. I was doing some interviews for a client, marketing interviews with their customers. And this client thought that that the only thing his customers cared about was price. And one of my questions is: Rank the top three things that go into your decision. And almost none of them put price in the top three. It was all about quality and service and timeliness and responsiveness and things like that.

Rob:       I saw a survey from CompTIA did the same thing. When asking MSPs or the channel when they’re selecting vendors, what’s the criteria? Prices down is like number seven. It starts with support. It starts with quality, it starts with innovation. And then things like the tangible stuff like price and even the partner program are rounding out the top ten. Same reasons why end users buy from MSPs.

Louis:    So you also talk about educating partners more. What are the most important thing that you focus for on partner education?

Rob:       So myself as a vendor, when I’m doing a speaking engagement or at an event, my goal is to provide value for the channel. It’s always to sell my product; it’s always to move my company forward. But if I can provide some type of value for the people that are in the audience, if you can see us as a vendor that really does genuinely care about moving the channel forward and therefore I’m going to talk to you about maybe something your business is a little bit weak in. Or I’m going to give you a tool that maybe closes the gap that you have. Regardless of whether you consume Datto product or not, then you’re going to want to do business with me. Or at some point in time, you’re going to want to do business with me. My entire kind of approach to when I, when I have an event.

So I’m doing a keynote tomorrow in Nashville, Tennessee, probably in front of about a thousand MSPs. Okay? So what I’m going to talk about is two objections. MSPS get traditionally objections of It’s never going to happen to me. So I don’t need you. You’re too expensive. So I have ways of overcoming those objections for an MSP. I have tools that I’m going to give the MSPs in the audience or about how to overcome those objections. And by the way, if you’re interested in Datto products, I’ve got a great team and a great booths set up and we’re going to be here for two days, come by and talk to us. But if I can create some level of value for your business, you’re more likely to actually look at my product or my service in the future. Now, if you translate that to an MSP, if there’s an MSP listening to this podcast, if you think about it from that perspective, think about going to your own community and providing that level of education to anybody who wants it.

So you’re offering for free to go and talk about cybersecurity, not your business, but cyber security as a whole because you’re the expert in the SMB region. Talk about things like the ransomware epidemic. Talk about how malicious attacks are targeting SMBs. Talk about amount of downtime that small businesses are having. And I got a ton of content that I give MSPs to go and talk about this stuff. But if you do this stuff and go out in your community and become an expert, guess what? Same thing: people will want to come and ultimately do business with you because you are that expert, because you do care about their businesses and you’re not just trying to sell them something. That’s where that whole education piece comes in is being a leader within your community or a respected person within your community. Not just trying to sell another dollar, another loonie or you know, krona, or whatever it is.

Louis:    And that’s an an area where I and my agency, what I find is that many partners and resellers are not very strong at marketing.

Rob:       No.

Louis:    And not only do they not a sell through as much of your product as they might, they don’t grow their businesses as fast as they could.

Rob:       Yeh, let me ask you a question then: Why is it that vendors will get on stage. They have a captive audience. And you just said it. What do the MSPs need? Okay. The MSPs struggle with sales and marketing, not tech. They get technology. They are technologists. So why do vendors continually get onstage and talk about technology? Why not talk about what the gap is? What do the MSPs need the most?

Louis:    Yeah, no, I agree. As you know, marketing today is not an easy, not an easy area at all. It’s gotten far, far more complex than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And so getting them to understand it and then to actually motivate them and give them the support to actually execute on it — it’s not a trivial thing.

Rob:       No, no. It’s not. And I get it. A lot off MSPS, I think the average MSP is working with 35 different vendors. And it’s a pain in the ass to field calls from them every single day. Plus the ones you’re not working with that are trying to sell you something. But I will tell you, and, and you know, I offer this advice to all MSPs. Go to your vendors, ask them for two things. Number one, what’s your roadmap look like? Show me innovation over the next three, four, five years. So I’m talking to my end users about what innovation in my business and their business is going to look like. And the second thing to look for which or should ask for, which goes back to what your comment is, What can you do to help me grow my business now?

And that has to be things like marketing programs. It has to be things like content for them to be able to deliver. Ideas for them to be able to deliver. Sales objectioning models. Maybe even the MDF funds for them to actually go out and run events or, or do ad campaigns, stuff like that. Like as a vendor, I should not just be providing technology. I should also be providing you support around and help and training around that technology. And not just tech but sales and marketing and, and you know, nobody’s going to sell BDR better than I can, but I can at least pass that wisdom on to an MSP so they can go and at least pass that wisdom on to an end user and hopefully make some money at it.

Louis:    You have a Dattocon annual conference. How does that fit into all of your partner education and your partner?

Rob:       Massive. So Dattocon is our annual user conference. And we do two. We do one in the United States and we do one in Europe, although both are international shows. We have Europeans coming to the American show and Americans going to the European show. And it’s a phenomenal community. So it’s one of the largest, if not the largest MSP event, worldwide. This year it’s going to be in San Diego, California, in June. We have 2100 MSPs, probably closer to 2,500, MSPs will be in the audience from all over the world. with another add-in in for vendors and staff, probably close to 3000 people at Dattocon.

But it is an MSP show. And one of the cool things I love about that Dattocon is education is critical. You’re going to spend two and a half days out of the office; you’re going to need to learn something. So we have tracks set up where you can pick a technical track if you’re technical. Or sales and marketing, if you want sales marketing. If you’re the business owner and you need to know,  we have a business ops track that’s being run by multimillion dollar MSPs. So we’ve got a number of different kinds of tracks and options, some great keynote speakers. We have a little bit of fun as well, like some big parties and stuff like that. But I think probably the most critical part is that most of the content is actually being delivered by other MSPs.

I get a chance to travel around the world and talk to a lot of MSPs, some that are successful, some that aren’t. And I find these cool MSPs that have found a great angle or a great hook around, maybe it’s sales, maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s using MDF funds, maybe it’s around the actual technology. And we actually bring them to Dattocon and have them onstage showing the rest of the world what it is that they’re doing and how they’re having success. So the message is coming from another MSP, not a vendor to an MSP.

And then we have our European event this year, it’s in Paris in October. So you know, a really, really cool place to go and learn. I think it helps an MSP. Like the biggest value you’re going to get from it is actually engaging with others. And when you find out that what’s keeping you up at night is also keeping others up at night, but somebody else out there has solved this problem. And you generally will walk away from there with a ton of learning, engagement, relationships, those kinds of things. We also have about 60 or 70 vendors sponsors. So you’ll also learn a lot about some of the newer technologies that are coming up, which is also super important in making sure you constantly evolve your business. So really trying to condense as much learning as we can into a short period of time.

Louis:    That sounds great. Rob, this has been terrific. I just want to wrap up with a couple questions. Business is changing so rapidly for everybody. How do you personally keep up and learn? Podcasts? Books? Events? Any favorites that you have?

Rob:       I actually do fly a lot.

Louis:    I believe that.

Rob:       I do. And for me, if I’m on a flight, I’m actually not online. As much as there is WiFi these days and everything like that, (A) It’s terrible. So just trying to stay connected is frustrating enough. So when I’m on a plane, that’s kind of the time that I book to myself and for learning. And there’s a couple of things. A lot of a lot of MSPs write books. There was some phenomenal books out there written by managed service providers. So I’ve got a ton of reading about and it’s all from the perspective of the MSP. So for me, I kind of immerse myself in that. I also listened to a ton of podcasts. I think, just the evolution of the podcast where it’s all going, the content that you can find online is absolutely amazing. You can find a podcast about pretty much anything these days. So I love those and definitely download and listen to a bunch of those.

Louis:    Any particular podcasts?

Rob:       From a channel perspective, like if from an education within the channel perspective, there’s a few, actually. I’m a big fan of Larry Walsh. He runs one that’s called the 2112 podcast. Really cool inner inner inner inner look into the channel and how things tick. And you know, he’s got different guests on each week. And I find that super interesting. There’s a vendor out of Canada called Auvik which does network monitoring. They’ve got a great podcast series that they just got off the ground called Frankly MSP. Some really cool stuff that they’re cranking out. Some really kind of thought leadership that’s in there. There’s a ton. There’s a ton. There’s no shortage. I’ve even got my own podcast.

Louis:    Okay.

Rob:       One of the best ways to learn about the pulse of the channel — and it’s painful and sometimes it’s offensive — is watching social media. And you know, there’s a lot of of vendors that hate this because there’s trolls in the world. And there’s always somebody in a group that’s going to hate you no matter what you say or what you do. But listening and watching. I know I subscribe to about four different Facebook sites that are exclusive to MSP business owners and they will get on there and they’ll say, you know, here’s what I love about this vendor. Hate about this vendor. Love this/hate this tech. But it is a great way to get a good pulse. Reddit is another one of those. I prefer Facebook versus Reddit cause Reddit is very anonymous and you can’t really tell whether it’s a real person or maybe a competitor that’s posting nonsense. Whereas Facebook you can track it to a real human being. So you know, getting in there and actually going through this stuff and getting a mindset of the MSPS. I do a lot of that as well, but it can also rot your brain if you, if you really let it get to you emotionally.

Louis:    Yeah, no, those are all great suggestions. And using social media, even if you’re not engaging and posting, to hear what customers and partners are really talking about in terms of you and your competitors. That’s a great use of it.

Rob:       You’ll always learn more by listening than you will by speaking.

Louis:    Yeah, absolutely. How can people contact you, and Datto, and learn more about your partner program?

Rob:       datto.com My email address is rob at datto.com.  I’m happy to answer any questions.  If you want to take a look at the tools that we’ve got that I mentioned, you know I’ve got things like downtime calculators, I got some cool little commercial videos that we produced for partners, non-Datto related. If you are interested in that, if you send an email to tools at datto.com you’ll get a bounce back email like an out of office with direct access to all those. You don’t have to sign up or take a call or do a demo or anything like that. You literally get all those really cool tools that we’ve got on the go at the current moment. So tools at datto.com. And then, of course, the Dattocon site: dattocon.com if you’re interested in joining 2,000 to 2,500 other MSPs in San Diego in June, we’d love to have you.

Louis:    And I’ll put show notes for all that that’ll be at revenueassociates.biz. So thank you so much for joining us today, Rob.

Rob:       Thanks for doing this.

Louis:    That was so interesting. So if you’re listening to this podcast on Apple podcasts or another app, and you found it as interesting as I did and useful, please leave a review that will help other people learn about it too. Thank you for listening to this podcast and please subscribe and listen to future episodes.