Transcript

Sheryl Wharff (Introduction): We want to make sure from a partnership side of it, that every investment in dollar that we make is returned in $5. So if we invest a dollar, we want five back in terms of revenue. If we’re investing a dollar into a program, we want to see 22x on the portfolio growth of pipeline.

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 Sheryl Wharff, who is the Americas Channel and Alliance Partner marketing leader at Micro Focus. Previously Sheryl held senior channel marketing positions at HPE, Thales, Kaspersky, EMC, and other companies. And Sheryl was chosen as one of the top 100 Women of the Channel in 2013 by CRN Magazine.

Sheryl, welcome to the podcast.

Sheryl: Thank you very much, happy to be here Louis.

Louis:   You’ve had a terrific career, a lot of it channel focused. Please tell me about your career path that brought you to where you are today and what continues to interest you about working with the Channel?

Sheryl: I’ve loved working with the channel. I’ve had a very long career doing that for about 35 years now, and it’s been very exciting. One of the things I like always the most about working with channel partners is not only do you have an opportunity to learn about your own company and what you do, but you get the opportunity to learn about what it is that your channel partners do and how they go to market and are successful. So together that has been something that’s always been very exciting. For me I started out working with channel partners back in the data encryption days, and I’ve kind of come full circle.

In my years at HPE I became acquainted with the company and brought into the encryption side of the business. So the first electronic check that ever passed through the Department of Treasury was done with encryption back at the company I was with and working with channel partners at GTE Cybertrust. And roll forward 30 years here we are at HPE and now Micro Focus working with channel partners who helped with those security and data encryption sides of the business. So it’s been very, very exciting to see how all of that touches what we do every day.

Louis:   Yeah I think I read a piece, an interview with you around that first electronic check, that you worked on that for months to get all of that set up between the different partners, what is now done probably billions of times a day.

Sheryl: Exactly. It was very exciting back in those days USA Today indicated that that first electronic check was going to forever change the way we do banking and indeed it has. I haven’t been to the bank in years.

Louis:   Yeah, I know. And now you can deposit a check with your smartphone. No need to physically visit a bank anymore.

Sheryl: Exactly. And all through that process, we have great channel partners, resellers and alliances who all become a part of that network.

Louis:   So for people who aren’t familiar with it, can you tell us a bit about what Micro Focus is, what you do? I believe you’re the seventh largest software company in the world?

Sheryl: Absolutely. So we are a company that has combined with what was five software divisions of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and merged with Micro Focus. We chose to keep the Micro Focus name and brand, and today we are 14,000 employees strong across 43 countries and Micro Focus focuses on helping companies do digital transformation. In a nutshell, we actually help companies bridge that gap between the existing and the emerging technologies, helping them faster innovate with less risk, and helping them come to the new digital transformational age. So today we’re a $4 billion company. We have about 40,000 enterprise customers and 4,000-plus partners on a worldwide basis.

Louis:   So with 4,000-plus partners, what’s kind of the balance of direct and indirect for you? How much are the partners from a percentage basis, how much are they of revenue?

Sheryl: That’s a great question. So over 60% of our revenues come through our channel. Our channel ecosystem is very, very important. We view our partnerships as an extension to our Micro Focus business. And quite frankly, we as a company are only successful if our partners are successful.

Louis:   Yeah, well if they’re 60% of revenue then they’re hugely important to you. I know Jay McBain at Forrester talks about possibly 90% of tech revenue being from the channels in several years from now. Do you see that growing at Micro Focus?

Sheryl: We absolutely do, and for us we have both a reseller community, a distribution community and also an alliance partner community. In addition to that, we also do technical relationships as it relates to OEM etcetera. So all our various different kinds of partnerships are critically important to our overall business.

Louis:   So you just rolled out a new global partner program this month, the Better Together Program. What is that and what drove this update?

Sheryl: Well, as I mentioned, we’re very, very excited. Not only have we just rolled this out, but CRN Magazine has just announced that we have been awarded a five star for that partner program which is very exciting to us. This actually represents a large scale investment that we have made. We took two heritage partner programs, one from the HPE side and one from the Micro Focus side, and we launched what is today a new world-class global partner program on a single platform. Some of the most important parts of that is that we streamlined and we simplified that new program and structure so that our partners could operate on a new partner portal really from quote to revenue. And it enables our partners to generate more predictive revenues, help them build their pipeline more effectively, and we hope more easily and effectively sell with us.

Louis:   I know you have built partner programs, or overseen partner portals rather at some other companies before Micro Focus too. Was this new one as part of your new program, was that an off the shelf portal or was that something you had to build your own?

Sheryl: That’s a great question. Actually a lot of this was customizations. We’ve linked everything, as I mentioned, from quote to cash. We’ve also linked our services side of it, our deal registration, our MDF system, our training and enablement, all of the things that partners are going to need. So much of that was done in a customized fashion. I don’t specifically have the pieces behind it because this is a much larger piece of the business than I myself have just touched. But this is a very important piece of it and it was a significant investment for the company over the last several months now.

Louis:   So the development of this portal and this whole new program that really was driven by the merger of these organizations?

Sheryl: That’s correct. Our partner portal played a very important piece of the investments that we’ve made over the last number of months because it is bringing together everything that we believe our partners are really going to need. So again, it really is from quote to cash. So it’s the deal registration, it’s our MDF system, it’s our enablement. It is the back end sales force side of it that builds on top of, with a lot of customizations to bring in the services components and all the many things around our partners and our partner’s customers and a view of that into the system. So again, the whole ability is to give our partners, as we do ourselves, additional insight into how we can be much more predictable about what is the pipeline and what is the revenue as we’re growing that out into the market.

Louis:   Now I don’t know if this is your area or not because you did just roll out this big portal reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a senior marketing person at another enterprise company who said that he didn’t think that channel software was as enterprise-ready as marketing technology in general. And you just said you did quite a lot of customization to develop your portal. Do you think that there’s a gap there between perhaps what enterprises need on the channel software side and what’s available?

Sheryl: I’m not sure that I’m the best one to answer that question. But what I will tell you is that we did know that there were a lot of things that we felt were really important and various pieces of insights that we wanted to provide to our partners. So we do believe that our partner portal with the customizations that we’ve made will give them much better insight than they’ve ever had the ability to have before. I think anytime you’re working with your major systems, for us because we were just bringing together two different companies business systems to start with. I think in our case having a portal link into those new systems that were just linked together was a very important piece of the overall process of really allowing us to have the kind of insight and hindsight into our partners’ business and services business that we have across the company. So I think that’s where probably more the customizations and things occurred. Is it because software’s not that readily available in the market? I think there’s always a framework and a base framework, but I do think that it really requires customizations to really have the kind of go-to-market that any company might really want.

Louis:   So I saw on your website a video of Phil Rayment, the VP of Channel Sales at Micro Focus, and he was saying that Micro Focus is easy for partners, easy to do business with. And that sounds a lot like customer experience. How do you think about improving the partner experience at Micro Focus, but even at companies before you were at Micro Focus?

Sheryl: Well, again I think as we brought out our new program it was really important for us to concentrate on sort of three primary areas of improvements, as you’re working with partnerships. And one is every day a partner has a choice of who they want to partner with and who they want to spend their time with. So unless you are easy to do business, unless you have a simplified structure that they easily can understand, it’s very difficult for partners to do business, they won’t. So that was the first piece of it.

The second part of it is I think we have to make sure always that partners can recognize the value and the rewards that are going to come from them. So with us coming together, we now have a very extensive portfolio that allows them to significantly cross-sell and upsell and actually have adjacent solutions. So this gives them some additional areas of expertise that they can have and, building on that, some new specializations that are important for them because it also allows them to have these expert accreditations and make more money.

Then the third part of it for us was really driving growth and having that predictable profitability for a partner, because again they have a choice every day. So they want to understand how are they going to make their money? What are the solutions that are going to help them do that? What kinds of tools are there to help them learn? So things like deal registrations and rebates and market development funds and all of the other pieces of it that we can bring together to help them know how much margins they’re going to make on deals, etcetera, is very, very important to them.

So those were our three primary premises for what do we really need that partners care about. There’s lots of other things, but those are three important parts. Be easy to do business, have a portfolio that is second to none in the industry, and allow our partners to become more profitable with working with Micro Focus.

Louis:   That first one sounds a lot like on the consumer side it’s sometimes described as reducing or eliminating friction. Just making it as easy as possible for a customer, or in this case a partner, to do business with you.

Sheryl: Again I think that’s very important. When you have a choice every day if it’s not easy you’re not going to do it.

Louis:   Yeah, absolutely and these days people in business expect a consumer-like experience. They don’t want to a clunky B2B sort of experience; they expect the B2B experience to be just as easy as the consumer experience. So one of my clients who’s an SVP of sales and marketing said that he thinks of marketing and partner marketing as being like totally different animals. What’s your view on that, and how they may differ?

Sheryl: I think that when you’re talking about marketing in general, it’s you as a company trying to figure out how do you sell to the end user company. When you’re doing partner marketing, it’s really about how do we take what is the main manufacturer’s messaging and then add what is the unique and special sauce of the partner – whether it be their services or a unique delivery of it or a unique piece that they’ve built on top of it. But it’s really going to market with their message and how they add value, and then they drag along the solution that we bring as a software that becomes a part of it and a component. So it really is two different things. It’s our expertise as a manufacturer of software, and it’s the partner’s expertise in added value that differentiates them in the market that they’re leading and driving.

Louis:   You said you have something like 4,000 partners, so how many of those, what’s the size breakdown? How many of those are enterprises or large partners? How many of those are more SMB?

Sheryl: We have partners of all shapes and sizes. Our very, very large partners come in the form of our systems integrators and large relationships there. We have distributors, and we’ve recently gone through a process where we have gone from a lot of distributors down to three primary distributors. And then we also have resellers. And in that reseller market we have actually put them into kind of three tiers, what we call our top go-to-market partners, a mid-tier of partners, and then kind of the rest of them, right? So your top tier are those resellers that have very unique solutions and capabilities that they are bringing to market. They’re the ones where 80% of your business is being driven by those 20% of the partnership. And then there’s the mid-tier where they have very good intentions, and they do some number of deals, and it may not be a one to one, it may be several partner managers might manage those relationships.

Then we have a bottom tier that are excellent and even down to the smaller perhaps mom and pop type shop folks who tend to do one-off deals. They’re still very important to us, but they’re not as a consistent fashion. So those are sort of the, you know, the trends as we look at the partnerships. And what we really need is something that’s unique for all of them. Those who will invest in very large deals in a platform and a platinum sponsorship way;  those that fall into a gold category where again, have significant business, have significant business plans; and then those that are authorized that quite frankly can sell and manage our entire portfolio on a deal basis as they need it.

Louis:   Yeah I’ve heard that from other vendors that they may have an 80/20 situation with their partners, and those 80% may be doing just one or two deals a year, but cumulative they still may add up to quite a lot.

Sheryl: Absolutely. So all partners are important.

Louis:   Do you see skills gap, a marketing skills gap among the small and midsize partners?

Sheryl: Absolutely. You do that whenever you are working with a partner community. One of the things that we have done and have built into our new partner portal is a total enablement program. So there are online enablement’s to help them get onboard. There are different types of partner enablement’s again that are online that allow them to take courses and become certified. Then there are advanced and technical training that allows them to get very deep certifications, and then we offer continuous learning. In addition to having all those online things we’re also offering face to face, one-off enablement boot camps, those types of things so partners can meet individually with us as well.

Louis:   And do those tend to focus around the marketing of Micro Focus products or are those about training or education around marketing in general?

Sheryl: Oh, that’s a great question. So we don’t really offer marketing classes, what we really offer are solution classes that talk to the market and how it’s changing. So for instance, right now Micro Focus this year in 2019 is very focused on four very key solution focus areas. One is Enterprise DevOps. So we’re trying to help the market understand how do they go to market around that. One is Hybrid IT Management. Again how are folks trying to move from an on-premise into cloud environments? The next is Security Risk and Governance, because this becomes a very important part as GDPR and all the state regulations are coming into play. And then Predictive Analytics who help folks have insight.

So we’re taking these areas, helping our partners understand how are these affecting the market as a whole, and then helping them understand what are the solutions from a software perspective that we bring that help the partners go after these digital transformation four key areas.

Louis:   That sounds very valuable for them to understand the market better and to understand what kind of solutions that you have and how they can sell those. Are there other areas of partner enablement that you think are especially important to a successful partner program?

Sheryl: I think whenever you’re working with your partners, some of the other things that are very valuable is for them to understand how does your deal registration program work, so those are stackable discounts, and how they come to market through that process. Generally companies have an MDF and an MDF tool, and it’s important for them to understand how to use and leverage that tool and make the most out of it. One of the things we see many times in partner programs is, if you will, there’s money left on the table because they’re not really sure how to leverage it.

One of the things we’ve aligned ourselves with partner marketing is to make sure that we can help through a marketing side of it to enable our partnerships to become self-sufficient. We don’t want to do it for them; we want to enable them to be able to do it. So we’ve provided guides and kits and tools so our partners can take a lot of the materials that we’ve developed for them and then, as we mentioned, wrap their story and their business go-to-market around that and take it effectively out into the market. If the majority of the work is done for them, again it’s an 80/20 right? We’ve done 80% of the work and they now have to just customize the last 10% or 20% to effectively take it to market.

Louis:   So on your LinkedIn profile, you describe yourself as skilled at partner recruitment. So what do you think are some of the best practices that you know, or best techniques you have for partner recruitment?

Sheryl: That’s a great question. So I’ve spent a lot of my career on both the partner channel sales side of it as well as the partner channel marketing. Or I’ve held roles where I’ve done both. So for me, when I’m looking at bringing on a new partnership, again if it’s in this case, Micro Focus, I would be looking for a partner that has in fact expertise that they already have that is in one of those four key areas: that Enterprise DevOps, that Hybrid IT Management, the Security Risk and Governance, or the Predictive Analytics. Because at the end of the day, partners can’t change their spots to stripes.

So you do something that’s very good. So you want to figure out what kind of a partner are they and then what kind of capabilities do they have to add value. So again, you wouldn’t want to go after a partner when you’re recruiting — if you were going to have them add your security portfolio — if they didn’t already have a security practice. And have expertise around delivering or doing upfront assessments of where a company is at. So you really have to look at what kind of a partner they really are and where are their strengths. The best partnerships is you’ve aligned them with their business practices and what is their core competencies along with the portfolio that makes the most amount of sense for them.

Not all partners can sell all things and you wouldn’t want them to because they start getting way to, collaborative isn’t the right word, but as you try to go across that portfolio you want them to only bring on the additional things that really are side adjacent solutions that make sense to the primary portion of the business that they’re trying to go after. So that’s how I’ve always chose to find good recruitment and good partners to bring into that portfolio.

Louis:   Yeah, they have to kind of stay in their lane in a sense.

Sheryl: Yeah.

Louis:   You have a Twitter account, but you’re not very active on Twitter. I’m wondering what your philosophy of social media is and do you think the partners are there? Do you think it’s very important?

Sheryl: Well, that’s an interesting thing. So I use LinkedIn a lot, and that’s my primary choice of business. As a company we have Twitter, we have Facebook, we have LinkedIn, we have all of them, right. And we also use something called EveryoneSocial. So we post and put things on, and I author those into EveryoneSocial. And then the company automatically pushes those out and then we all push them out additionally to those various platforms. So even though you may not see my name and see that piece of it, I’m authoring a lot of those things behind the scenes on behalf of Micro Focus as the company and the channel and the alliance.

Louis:   That’s interesting, and I could well understand that LinkedIn could be much more valuable than Twitter. You know I find the connections, I have far fewer connections on LinkedIn, but they’re much stronger connections and much more conversation.

So, again in your LinkedIn profile you use the verb drive a lot to describe what you do, such as “responsible for driving and leading the Americas Channel and Alliance Partner marketing team”. I’m wondering what’s your approach to managing?

Sheryl: I use that word drive because if you are the creator and you’re responsible for making the stuff happen, you’re the driver. So for me it’s starting often with a blank sheet of paper, trying to figure out what it is that I want to do with my partnerships, creating their program and their plan, and then driving that piece of it into their organization to ensure that the right relationships are linked and that the right outcomes are in place. We want to make sure, from a partnership side of it, that every investment in dollar that we make is returned in $5.

So if we invest a dollar, we want five back in terms of revenue. If we’re investing a dollar into a program, we want to see 22x on the portfolio growth of pipeline. So we try to measure and track each one of those kinds of pieces of it and I start with that blank sheet of paper. I work with those partnerships. We make sure that there’s buy off and agreement, which is critical with a partner organization, and then I help them to be successful. So you’re constantly driving it through first the idea, all the way to the ROI that you’re looking for. Someone has to be that driver. I take that role seriously as I lead the channel and I lead the alliances in that marketing activities. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about an activity, it’s about the end result that we’re trying to have, which is gross of our pipeline and ultimately growth of the revenue of both companies.

Louis:   So I mentioned early on that you were named a top 100 Women of the Channel. What do you think are the opportunities or challenges for women in tech today? You mentioned you’ve been in the field for over 30 years. How do you think it’s changed for women. What are those opportunities/challenges now?

Sheryl: I’ve been very excited about having been and had the opportunity to work in the channel, and I love the fact that CRN recognizes top Women in the Channel. I actually had stepped out of the channel for a while, and I played a product marketing role in HP and HPE for three of the past five years. I then moved back in the channel to manage over the last couple of years. So I think for women it’s still an uphill battle. However, I think there’s a lot more opportunity today. Having been part of HP and HPE, it was exciting to see Meg Whitman as a leader of our company. It’s very exciting to see women take even more roles. We do a lot of things, whether it is in the Channel, we have a group called Shine within the company that allows women to step up, to have additional engagements, to have a collaborative effort inside of the company.

I have always had a group that consisted of both men and women across my partner marketing channel. I think it’s nice to have a balance. I think both men and women bring different aspects and capabilities to the company, but we continue to foster additional women through leadership roles and technology. And the channels then one that you often see women coming into that environment. And you see a lot of women in the Channel more especially as it relates to marketing efforts. So I through channel sales for years, had been one of only a few channel sales reps, but over the course of the years it continues to grow. I love the fact that you’re constantly looking at women and trying to develop the coming generations. I’ve always been a working mother. I believe today that my daughter is well equipped to not only manage a household and children, which today I’m a grandmother as well, but also have a very high tech career herself as she moves out into that market.

So generating the next class of women who want to come along and continue to build those ranks is an important part of what I’ve always seen as my role as somebody who’s been in that market as a female leader for a long time.

Louis:   All right, terrific. So Sheryl, what haven’t I asked you about that I should have. What keeps you up at night or what do you see as your big challenges these days?

Sheryl: I think the biggest challenge is again that we continued to have right now is the market is still sort of saying Who is Micro Focus? We came from a very well-known company, HP and HPE. And Micro Focus was a European-based company, so the name in the market isn’t one that just rolls off a person’s tongue. And today they don’t know that we are this huge $4 billion company that really is the seventh largest software company in the world. And what that really means is we have expertise today and we have the capabilities with a portfolio to help these companies drive digital transformations. So one of the things that is the most challenging is to make sure that people find out and know who Micro Focus is. We are not your old HPE and we are not your old Micro Focus.

So today the 2019 Micro Focus is a totally different company. We’re a company that I like to say has SASI digital transformation solutions. And what I mean by that is ‘S’ we secure the enterprise through DevOps; ‘A’, we help them accelerate their business into that Hybrid IT Management and cloud environment; ‘S’, we help provide Security Risk and Governance solutions; and ‘I’ we have Predictive Analytics that we can help companies with. So again, that elevator pitch I like to leave people with so that they can learn who Micro Focus is, is we provide those SASI digital transformational solutions to help them generate the revenues that they need in today’s market.

Louis:   Okay. So the business world keeps changing very quickly; the channel world changes very quickly. Obviously your company has changed a lot just in the last few years. What blogs, podcasts, events, books, websites do you use to keep up?

Sheryl: I actually use a lot of different ones, and I use a lot of different sites within my Channel. I use things like Tech Target, I use ISMG, I use LinkedIn, I use CRN. Again, depending on what it is and where the information is there’s such a breath of information that’s available. But all of those different platforms have different constituents and different folks that are really important to the primary focus areas that we’re going after.

So for me, I’m trying to make sure that I keep current on where the market is, what’s going on from our analysts and where we are in the PR front. Because again, that challenge is how do we help these customers out here learn about who is the new Micro Focus and how do we really help them with their digital transformations so that they have less risk and can really innovate faster into that new transition.

Louis:   Okay. And I’ll put links to those in the show notes, in the podcast section of revenueassociates.biz. So thank you, Sheryl. How can people get in touch with you?

Sheryl: Sure. So I am available at swharff at microfocus.com, and I would be more than happy to have folks reach out to me.

Louis:   Well thank you again Sheryl, and if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or another App, and you found this conversation with Sheryl as interesting and useful as I did, 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.