Transcript

Sandra Glaser Cheek: So through that we built an incremental $566 million in business plan revenue goals which is fantastic. And what we’ve seen with our deal registration is a 46% increase in our deal reg pipeline, plus a 25% increase in the number of registrations. And we’ve seen from a services accreditation standpoint about a 240% increase in the number of partners who have signed up to become services accredited partners. It’s just fantastic. We just blew our expectations away on every goal that we gave ourselves.

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. And if you like what you hear in the podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify or whatever service you’re using to listen to it; that will help others find it too. Today, I’m talking with Sandra Glaser Cheek, Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances at Ciena. Prior to Ciena, Sandra had senior channel positions at Brocade, Ruckus Networks, Extreme Networks, VMware, Amazon, and Adobe.

Sandra won the 2016 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs with over 350,000 votes. And this is a quote from one of her supporters, ‘Sandra is the cream of the crop, one of the top channel leaders in the business. She is very good at seeing things through the prism and lens of the solution provider while at the same time staying firm with what the value is for the manufacturer’. Sandra, welcome to the podcast.

Sandra: Well that was a lovely introduction. Glad to be here.

Louis:    So you have something on your Twitter profile that I love. You say everything changes. Don’t be afraid. What prompted you to include that?

Sandra: Well, I live here in Silicon Valley and I think that’s probably our motto. You hear frequently here: If you’re going to fail, fail fast. That’s another motto here and I love challenges. I love change and I love solving problems and I feel like if you can embrace change your life in Silicon Valley would be all the more easier.

Louis:    Absolutely. When you’re in the tech industry — and this is what this Software Channel Partner Podcast is all about — you do have to be nimble and you do have to embrace change or you’re going to get left behind very quickly. So as I was saying, you’ve had a great career, it’s not over yet and worked with great companies. So please just tell me a little bit more if you would about your career path and what it is that you like so much about working in the channel.

Sandra: Oh, we’re going to go into the tales of a channel junkie here I think. I started my career off in B2B sales in New York City on Wall Street selling networking and computer systems to financial institutions. And I was promoted and relocated to another office in Midtown New York where I sold to the media vertical market and advertising. So I had ad agencies and publishing houses and companies like HBO that were my clients. And one day one of my clients said, Hey, Adobe’s looking for a sales rep, would you be interested? And it was actually a channel sales position and that was my entree into the world of channel.

Now I was always pretty successful at selling, but I never felt like I was the best salesperson. And I always felt like the reason why I was successful was because of the relationships I developed, not because I had the sharpest sales skills. And when I moved over into the channel side of the business, it really felt like I just put on a glove that fit. I really enjoyed being on the assist and co-selling with partners. And I haven’t looked back since then. I have held various channel roles, that was a role with Adobe in New York. I was promoted and relocated out to California to run North America channel sales.

And I dabbled in a couple of startups during the .com boom. And have worked in channel consulting and as you mentioned, VMware. I felt like I needed some channel marketing expertise to round out my sales expertise and I took a full-on marketing role. And after that I moved into partner sales programs, enablement operations and marketing and that was at Extreme Networks. And you mentioned the last few channel chief roles where I’ve had global responsibilities or the channel sales go to market programs, partner training and enablement, partner marketing and operations. And that’s where we’ve landed today.

Louis:    Well that great career path that you’ve had really highlights something that you and I were talking about before we started recording the podcast, which was when you’re heading up a channel program, you just have this incredible range of responsibilities and things that you’re involved with. Kind of like running a company, but you get to be involved with every part of a business and working with some of the other businesses.

Sandra: Absolutely. You know, leaving VMware was not an easy decision. It was a great company to work for. We were doing great, but I knew in my heart of hearts that marketing was not going to be the place where I wanted to grow my career. And I had an opportunity to go to a smaller company and take on that responsibility operationally, programmatically with marketing and training and enablement matrixed into that. And when you and I were chatting, the thing I love about the role that I have is there are very few roles within a corporation where you can have that span of responsibility if you’re not at the C level.

And I have learned a tremendous amount just from working with fantastic folks from an operational standpoint or marketing standpoint. And when you are a channel chief, it’s really important that even though you have all of these functions, those same functions exist at a corporate level. And so needing to lead by influence and needing to cross-functionally be able to share the value of the channel and how that fits into corporate operations or corporate marketing or corporate sales is really something I enjoy a lot.

Louis:    So can you tell people what Ciena does and who you sell to?

Sandra: Well Ciena is a networking infrastructure company and we primarily play in the optical networking space. Our customers tend to be service providers and telecom industry. But we do have enterprise business, but it tends to be in the vertical markets where you need really lightning fast networks, complex LANs. About four years ago we acquired a company called Cyan and developed a software offering called Blue Planet that’s a wholly-owned division of Ciena and our software solutions, our SDN, NFV, orchestration, etc and so we have both software and hardware offerings for our customers that run the gamut from telecom to the enterprise.

Louis:    So about how many partners does Ciena have and roughly what percentage of your revenue comes from the channel?

Sandra: Ciena’s an interesting company for me. For the first time ever, I’m working with a company whose partner’s number in the hundreds and not the thousands and tens of thousands. However, we are a large growing company and roughly about a billion, a little over a billion dollars is partner contributed with the hundreds of partners that we work with at Ciena.

Louis:    Those are very productive partners. So are the partners mostly working in the enterprise space for you?

Sandra: What’s interesting about Ciena is we don’t exist if there’s isn’t fiber in the ground, and fiber is controlled differently in different parts of the world. So in North America, companies can own and manage their own fiber and we have a lot more enterprise opportunities. However, in Latin America and other regions and in EMEA and Asia, the fiber can be owned either by the government or by the telecom companies and the enterprise business is then delivered through the telco’s and the service providers. So our go-to market strategy differs with partners depending on the regions. So with our partner ecosystem, many of our customers are also our partners.

So take for example the big telecom providers like a Comcast or AT&T or Deutsche Telekom, for example. They will buy hardware and software infrastructure from Ciena as a customer, but they’ve also joined our partner program because they build services on top of that infrastructure. And the managed services, the carrier managed services that they sell to the enterprise, we work with them to help bring those services to market through the program. And with programs like our MDF program, we help drive demand for those services, which in turn drives more demand as a customer for our infrastructure. And now that’s just one part of our go-to-market with partners.

We do also have regional solution providers and systems integrators that are more traditional to the channel, but these tend to be specialty solution providers and systems integrators in our space. So many, many enterprise companies have spent the last, you know, five to eight years helping partners to really specialize because of the cloud and virtualization and needing to have competencies and specializations. I’ve entered into an ecosystem where we already have highly specialized partners and we really don’t have very many generalists.

Louis:    Yeh, I was talking with another guest about how when you have a smaller focused market, you may not need very many partners, unlike companies, for example, that are selling to the SMB space where you need a lot of partners to have the coverage for all of that. Now you’ve launched a new partner program at Ciena last year, the Ciena Partner Network or the CPN. What prompted that and how is it different from what Ciena was doing before?

Sandra: Well, we just talked about my background and Ciena really isn’t an obvious choice for me given where I’ve spent pretty much my entire career in the enterprise. But I had an opportunity at Ciena to basically have a clean slate and reimagine what a partner program of the future might be. And for a number of years I had wanted to do this, but I had worked for companies that were so channel dependent on the existing programs that they were a little risk-averse to take any chances on really rethinking what that program of the future might look like.

So I jumped at the opportunity to redesign and think about what the future looks like. How do we build a program that can withstand all the technological disruption and the changing business models that are happening because of that disruption with our partner ecosystem. So I jumped at this opportunity and we are just coming up on the first year anniversary of launching the program and all signs are pointing to some very good decisions we made.

Louis:    So that sounds very exciting when you talk about really looking at everything and how to make a very forward-looking program that could take advantage of everything that’s happening in the channel and respond to everything that’s happening in the channel. And I know that you’re a very big proponent of personalized or individualized partner relationships. So I assume that that’s kind of central to what this new program that you rolled out a year ago is?

Sandra: It absolutely is. So we created this tagline, ‘partnering is personal’. When I first came in to Ciena, I spent a fair amount of time assessing. I was new to the industry. I hadn’t worked in the telecom space before and I wanted to make sure that I really listened and understood not only our business but our partner’s needs. And quite frankly, when you’re new and you’re driving change, your internal customers are just as important, too. And one of the things that I learned, despite the fact that our existing partner program really wasn’t built for the telecom space, our partners were willing to overlook our inefficiencies because of the way that Ciena created these personal relationships. And as I looked at partner surveys that I did and spoke to partners, it became really clear that that was really our secret sauce.

This is a Ciena cultural thing, and how can I take that secret sauce that I have and make that really relevant as we continue to grow, as we continue to grow our ecosystem with partners. So what we did was we created a platform where we pretty much eliminated the levels around barriers to entry. We lowered the barriers to entry. All of you who develop partner programs know that we’re bound by — in America — by the Robinson Patman rule where we have to treat like partners alike.

So we had to create some barrier to entry so that we could categorize our partners. But what we did was we created business planning as the foundation to the program. Now most programs do have business planning, but if you talk to most partners, they all see it as a checklist item that gets done and then gets put on the shelf. And it’s really not part of the fabric of the way that vendors engage with partners.

So what we did was we said basically your business plan is your program and we’re going to sit down and put together our joint goals for the next one to three years. What I didn’t mention earlier is that our sales cycles tend to be longer than most other vendors. It’s 12 to 36 months on average to close a deal at Ciena. So when we wanted to look at how do we build our future together over the one to three years, but the business plan is a 12-month plan and we map out our goals.

The next thing we did that was very personalized was we didn’t tell partners that they had to earn certain certifications or specializations or competencies in order to earn their benefits in the program. We looked at the goals that we had and we built personalized training and enablement plans to each partner’s goals. So now ostensibly each partner has their own personalized program.

The third part of that business plan was the market development plan. Our MDF program had been an accrual-based model pretty much managed and spent by our field marketing teams. And what we did was we aligned with the sales teams who manage the partners with the marketing teams and the third part of the business plan was a market development plan. So everything that we were spending from an MDF and other resources standpoint had to be aligned to the business plan and the goals of the plan, and the sales leader had the ultimate sign off of the overall plan.

Louis:    So that makes a ton of sense. How do you in practice do it? Who at Ciena is working with the individual partner to develop that kind of individualized program for each one of them?

Sandra: Well, there’s a number of people who work with the partner.  So it is the channel account teams that work with the partner to develop the goals. And then my team that owns the training and enablement will work with the partner and look at the goals and come up with the personalized training and enablement plan. And then field marketing, who is our field channel marketing, works with the partner and sales together on the market development plan.

And so we all have to work collaboratively. I run the global partner organization, so we are the overall governance of the business plan. But we had a lot of key learnings with this. We called this our Launch and Learn Year kind of as a joke because we all do lunch and learns with our partners in the field. We knew that we were going to learn a lot and we built a business planning, an online business planning tool that at the end of the day just didn’t meet our needs. We didn’t anticipate how complex some of this could get and that a kind of a cookie-cutter business planning tool wouldn’t work. So right now we’ve gone back to the drawing board and we’re looking at other vendors and we’re back to using Excel spreadsheets.

That said, I want to go back to the personalized enablement plans because, as you can imagine, that can be very resource-intensive. And if you’re listening to this podcast, most people don’t have as few partners as I do, but I truly believe that this is scalable. When you look at your partner networks, we all have the 80/20 rule that is really more like the 90/10 rule, or 95/5 rule, and if you look at that top tier of partners, you really can scale this for that top tier of partner. That’s one.

The second thing that we’re learning in year two now that we’re going into year two: the training and enablement, even though it’s personalized to the goal, we’re learning every day and every year how effective that personalized training is. So this year in year two when a partner wants to build, for example, a data center interconnect practice, we have all the learnings that we’ve had from the year before from partners who did that.

And so we are building common training pathways in year two that may be 80% build and there’s 20% customization based on that particular partner. And this is the year where we’re going to start bringing in machine learning so that we can do maybe some artificial intelligence in year three or towards the end of year two where this isn’t so person resource-intensive and we could start doing some learning with machine learning.

Louis:    Okay. Very interesting. I was actually recently talking with Balaji Subramanian who’s one of the channel leaders at ServiceMax. And they’re a lot smaller than Ciena, but they have a growing channel program with a limited number of partners and he really was talking about very personalized programs and relationships with the different partners, too. So you’ve been doing this, as you said, you’ve had your launch and learn and you’ve been doing it for about a year. And another one of the things that we talked about before we started recording, you used the phrase ‘phenomenal results’. So how’s it going?

Sandra: Phenomenal doesn’t even begin to, so this is really fun because we got a lot of attention, won a lot of awards when we launched this program. And now a year later, folks that I did podcasts with or journalists are saying, So a year later what happened? Well, I am happy to say we had a 710% increase year over year in training hours with our partners. And then 96% of our partners, we surveyed them who went through the new training academies that we created, rated it as a Highly Recommend, the training academies. So to give you an example, just to give you some perspective, we are North of 12,000 hours of training completed by our partners by less than 200 partners.

Louis:    Wow.

Sandra: That’s just phenomenal. From a joint business plan compliance, we have over 95% compliance. And what we mean by compliance is you have to, what we didn’t talk about, part of the business planning process is that quarterly business reviews are required. And so we have a 95% compliance, not only to getting your business plans done and holding ourselves accountable to what needs to be done in the plan, but also holding our regular quarterly business reviews.

And what’s so nice about this program is that you can change the business plan when you have your quarterly business reviews. Let’s say for some reason a service that you thought you were going to develop got held up for no reason other than corporate reasons. We have the latitude to change the business plan on a quarterly basis. So through that we built an incremental $566 million business plan revenue goals, which is fantastic. And what we’ve seen with our deal registration is a 46% increase in our deal reg pipeline plus a 25% increase in the number of registrations.

And we’ve seen from a services accreditation standpoint about a 240% increase in the number of partners who have signed up to become services accredited partners. It’s just fantastic. I can go on and on about the number of unique visitors that we have to our partner portal and the number of attendees that are coming to our enablement webinars. There’s just, there’s not a goal that we didn’t just surpass. We just blew our expectations away on every goal that we gave ourselves. So we’re feeling pretty good about what we’ve done.

Louis:    Yeh, understandably. Those are huge increases across the board in so many different areas. So this is because of the personal relationships, the personalization of the program. What do you think is driving it?

Sandra: I do believe that it has everything to do with how bespoke the program is to each partner. Some of the things that I heard from partners when I was in listening mode was that it’s really important for me to be a Ciena partner and I take the training you tell me I need to take. But it’s just not relevant to my business. And we are becoming more and more relevant to our partners businesses. And our partners feel like we truly understand their businesses and the challenges that they’re having. The fact that we can change our business plans through our quarterly business reviews and that we’re all on the same page, I think, has gone a long way.

Another thing that I’ve invested in to is in our internal training. We are primarily a direct selling organization and we have invested in channel account manager training, business plan training, power messaging, all of these things that would help partners really feel like our own people understand their businesses and the challenges that they are dealing with as partners in this industry. And our industry where we play, we’re not growing, we’re growing in single-digit numbers. So it is super competitive. And so it’s really important that our own folks understand the challenges that our partners have in a market that isn’t growing in double digits.

Louis:    But it sounds like your channel program results are much stronger than the industry average growth results.

Sandra: Well, that I didn’t say Ciena wasn’t growing. So this is just that the industry as a whole. And Ciena’s had a phenomenal year. We just closed out our last quarter, this quarter and you know, results aren’t in yet, but if you look at the last couple of years for Ciena, we are taking market share away and are continuing to grow at rates that our competitors are not growing at.

Louis:    Okay, great. So you said that at other companies you had worked at previously, you had much larger numbers of partners than Ciena. So how do you think you could scale this highly personalized program to an organization with thousands of partners?

Sandra: As I mentioned before, I think machine learning is going to play an important piece in that. And also really profiling your partners. And not just profiling, it’s just looking at partners along a value chain and really recognizing what is the most important value for your growth as a company that you need in partners and really categorizing your partners along a value chain.

Sometimes the value is the operational efficiency that you’re getting versus the high market penetration. Every company is different when you look at your partners and the value that they play in that value chain across the value that partners provide to your company. So looking at the profiles and the value and where your company’s strategic imperatives are, and singling out those partners that maybe fit where you want to grow is one way.

Another way, as I mentioned, is really looking at the partners that are producing most of your revenue or impacting or influencing most of your revenue and creating maybe perhaps like a lighthouse or pilot program with them to see how this would work with your company. But as I mentioned before, I really do believe that this can scale with machine learning from the partner training and enablement standpoint because there’s only so many solutions that we sell as a company. And so as your partners develop goals around how they want to grow their business with your solutions and you keep a database of what the partners did and what their results were over time, you’re going to get some really, really good analytics that will help you to automate this more.

Louis:    So mass personalization. What it sounds like though is that the role of the channel manager is going to be really critical to making those programs, working out those plans with partners and making this successful.

Sandra: Yes, but don’t underestimate the role of the training and the enablement team. If you’re considering doing this, there are upfront resources that need to be invested in because this is resource-intensive when you are, when you are creating this, because you are personalizing this for each partner.

So let’s say you have a hundred partners or 200 partners in that elite group that you want to work with. That’s 200 partners that you’re going to have to sit down with once the goals are determined and work collaboratively to understand what skill sets do you already have? Where do we have to augment those skillsets? What certifications do you already have that are industry certifications that you may be able to bypass some of our own training? So it definitely is resource-intensive, but when you look at the results that we have seen in year one, it really cannot be denied that the investment that we made up front is really starting to pay off.

Now these are the leading indicators. I built a five year journey at Ciena and we’re going into our third year now. The first year was really assess and build the framework. The second year was launch and learn. Year three, now that our partners are becoming more productive, this is when we’re going to start seeing that productivity and partners being a little more self-sufficient than they have and then year four and year five is when we’re going to start seeing that real acceleration.

Louis:    So you were saying this is the launch and learn year that you’ve just finished. So what are two or three of the big lessons that you learned?

Sandra: People don’t business plan online. An Excel spreadsheet is just fine, but build a really good one. So we have gone back to an Excel worksheet. But as I mentioned we are going to implement a tool that the spreadsheet can flow into and that we can drive the business goals and the QBRs and the slides. Part of the role of my team and the enablement team is to produce the QBR slides against the goals so that we make it easier for the field.

So lessons learned: the business planning training. Don’t underestimate the fact that there isn’t consistency across the board, across the globe in business planning. And so I think a lesson learned is that we have to set our business planning methodology upfront and then continuously train people on excellence in business planning.

Secondly is that, well we knew it was going to be resource intensive, but I would say that it was more resource intensive than we had anticipated because we wanted to get this right. And so there’s an extreme amount of caring on my team around building those personalized enablement plans.

And lesson three is change is hard. I would say that the change in our program was probably harder on our internal folks than it was on our partners. So we changed the MDF program, we changed the deal registration program, we changed business, everything was changed with the program.

And one of the lessons that I learned was that was a lot of change at once because we launched an entirely new program. And even though I believe we did an excellent job in the six months leading up to the launch of the program, training, enabling our teams, you know, they all have their day jobs to do and numbers to close. A lesson learned is that we had to continuously educate and reeducate around the program after launch because it was an awful lot that we launched and we’re changing all at once.

Louis:    So a lot of internal stakeholders that you had to bring them along and there was a lot of work in doing that.

Sandra: Yes. And that probably is a whole other podcast that we could talk about excellence in internal communications in driving change when you launch a wholesale new partner program.

Louis:    So what should I have asked you about today that I didn’t?

Sandra: How happy are our partners with this I think is probably, we touched on that a little bit. As I just mentioned, internally the change was hard, harder than with our partners. I think our partners really saw this as a breath of fresh air. And not only did they already have a positive affinity towards Ciena because of our personal relationships, but operationally I think that we’ve created a program that is really instilling a lot of goodwill and loyalty with our partners. They, you know, just when you see the compliance and just the statistics around how highly they recommend the program. Some of the quotes that you see in the press around programs. I think they see us as we’ve set the bar for other vendors to provide this kind of experience for them.

Now I know that this is harder for other vendors because of the size of partner ecosystems, but I really do believe that with the rapid change of technology and how that’s impacting our partners businesses, they are scrambling on how they figure out how do I start driving more services? Do I become a managed service provider, etc. Our program allows them to do that without any kind of impact to the benefits that they get because the business plan drives everything. And I think they feel like Ciena really understands the challenges that are set before them, not just in growing in our industry but in their businesses, especially as they continue to evolve their business models.

Louis:    Well, it sounds like it’s been the first year event, you know, with its normal learning curve and you know shake out cruise issues — that the first year of this has been a real success and that you’re well positioned for really great growth and even greater success in the next two or three years.

Sandra: It certainly, all arrows are pointing that way. This is what I call our inflection year. So all of these numbers that I’ve shared with you, as I said, are the leading indicators that everything we thought was the right thing to do was the right thing to do. And this is where I think the rubber really hits the road this year. Are we going to start seeing those, the incremental self-sufficiency and partners and finding new opportunities or building new services or competencies around that. So this is going to be a telltale year but I’m really bullish on it.

Louis:    Great. So Sandra, how can people contact you if they want to learn more about Ciena Partner Program or some of the other things that you’re working on?

Sandra: I think the best way is through LinkedIn. Reach out to me via LinkedIn. I’m happy to answer any questions or connect with you and network with you and share my experiences with this. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done, so I’m happy to share.

Louis:    All right, great. And we’ll put a link to that on the revenueassociates.biz website in the program notes. That’ll be part of, with this podcast. So thank you for joining us today, Sandra. That’s really interesting.

Sandra: It’s been a pleasure sharing what we’ve done this year and glad for the opportunity.

Louis:    So as I do with all guests, I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation. It was recently named one of the best marketing plan books of all time.

And thank you for listening to the Software Channel Partner Podcast. And please subscribe and listen to future episodes.