Transcript

Taylor Macdonald:  Over the time period between say 2019 — where we are — to 2025, 2026, we’ll see 80% of the market, 85% of the market move from traditional on-prem solutions to cloud solutions. So that’s an absolutely great place to be economically. Let’s say we get 2025, 2026, we’re at 80% then you’ve got the replacement market that then comes into play. But these next five or six years are like the early years of the Gold Rush in California.

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 enabling their channel partners to market better and grow faster. 

Today I’m talking with Taylor Macdonald, senior vice president for channel sales at Sage Intacct. Taylor has held senior channel roles at Promethean, Deltek, and Sage before in the early 2000s. Taylor has been on both sides of the partner relationship. In the 1990s his Macdonald Consulting Group was Sage software’s top worldwide business partner seven years in a row. He has received many awards, including appearing on the accounting today list of the top 100 most influential people in accounting 15 times. 

Taylor, welcome to the podcast.

Taylor:  Great to be here.

Louis:    So Sage Intacct is a combination of Sage and Intacct, you’ve kind of come full circle in your career.

Taylor:  I have. Two years ago next week Sage purchased Intacct and it’s been a great ride since then.

Louis:    So please tell me about your career path along the way over the last 20 or 30 years. What brought you to where you are today? What do you like about working in the channel?

Taylor:  Well, it’s interesting. I think I ended up in the channel like a lot of people do by accident. Out of college, I was a financial analyst for a couple of software companies and then I was a CFO for a real estate company. And at that point, I was looking for accounting software — this is the late 80s — and I chose MAS 90, which was sold by a company called State of the Art, that was purchased in 1998 by Sage Software.

And so while I enjoyed the accounting world and I enjoyed numbers and the like, like many accountants, and especially accounting in those days where it was more a backwards-looking as opposed to forward-looking today, I found it very repetitive. And I like technology and I liked software and so after that stint, I joined the ranks that many do of reselling and implementing accounting software for small and midsize businesses, and did that for a significant period of time, almost 10 years. And then I wanted to see what it was like on the publisher’s side. So that’s sort of the short version.

Louis:    Yeh. Well, you know, life does take you in places you didn’t expect to go. No one was telling me to study internet marketing when I was in high school or college.

Taylor:  Exactly.

Louis:    Please tell people about Sage Intacct’s software and solutions. What do you do and who do you serve?

Taylor:  Intacct was started almost 20 years ago as one of the very first cloud ERP solutions serving the middle market, so above the Intuits of the world and below the SAP and Workdays. So if you’re a middle-market company, Sage Intacct may be a great solution for you. The beauty of the accounting software market is that everyone has to do it. You’ve got to provide invoices, pay vendors, pay employees, and settle the books once a month. So we serve those fast-growing companies that are in that middle market.

Louis:    Yeh, I used to own a marketing agency that became a SaaS vendor that designed websites and had a content management system. And like you said, that was something also that no one was going to turn off their website. Once they were on board, that recurring revenue was going to keep happening. So are your solutions SaaS or are they on-premise or do you offer both?

Taylor:  Nope. So what’s great is we are a cloud-only and been cloud-only since the very beginning. Again, one of the very first and now one of the major cloud ERP solutions. We provide our customers with four releases a year in the cloud, everyone’s on the same version. And we do that with five nines uptime and great service and great partners.

Louis:    Yeh, you were way ahead of the game on that.

Taylor:  Yeh.

Louis:    So as I mentioned, you had a consulting firm in the 1990s and you were a very successful partner. Were you only working with one vendor then?

Taylor:  Well, it’s funny, I was a top state of the art partner with MAS 90 and we were also a top Great Plains partner with Great Plains prior to their selling to Microsoft.

Louis:    So what did you learn from being on the partner side about what makes for a great partner program and relationship?

Taylor:  I think that’s a great question and it’s one that I wish more channel people would ask. We’ve been fortunate at Sage Intacct that probably 80% of our channel team are ex-partners. So I think what you get by having a channel background of having being a partner is first and foremost is empathy: understanding that you as a publisher have drastically different levels of resources than partners do, number one. Number two, that you’re able to put decisions you make in better contexts. You can put yourself in their shoes, you understand their business, and you also understand why partners are succeeding and why oftentimes other partners aren’t succeeding.

Louis:    I do want to in the future have on the podcast a partner who works with — you know, a lot of partners have 20 or 30 vendors that they’re working with, especially the technology partners. And I definitely in the future want to have a partner on talking about the range of partner programs or channel programs they’ve seen and the good, the bad and the ugly.

So you’ve got at Sage Intacct, your partners fall into two categories, VARs and CPA accounting firms.  

Taylor:  Well, and it’s actually a little bit more complicated than that perhaps. So we go to market in two different ways. One is through what we historically call outsourced accounting, and that’s 99% CPAs who are working with small businesses jointly to do outsourced accounting. So a CPA firm is working with a smaller client typically, and they split up the responsibilities of what day to day accounting looks like.

Then we have our VAR partners, who are also CPA firms in many instances — and that’s one of the big changes over the last 10 years — who are reselling the Sage Intacct accounting software to larger firms who obviously have CFOs and have the capability to run that system. They have a full accounting staff.

Louis:    Okay. So when you talk about CPA accounting firms and outsourced accounting, they’re using your software to service companies, but the VARs are using it to resell and implement?

Taylor:  Exactly. And the only difference is interestingly enough that you know, today 6 out of our top 10 or 11 partners are also CPA firms. So we have some CPA firms that resell and implement Intacct, but also provide outsourcing services. And if you think about it, it’s a great strategy. I come in and say, Hey Louis, tell me about your business. It looks like Sage Intacct’s a great fit. We can do your outsourced accounting. And you say, Well, I’ve just hired a CFO and I’ll immediately switch and say, Well great, I’d love to sell and help your staff implement Sage Intacct, or vice versa. It’s just a matter of the staffing levels and the expertise that a firm and of course the size complexity always play into it.

Louis:    And you, in addition to your partners, you also sell direct?

Taylor:  Yes, we do. So one of the things that’s very unique about Sage Intacct is we have a hybrid channel. So we have a mid-sized direct sales force and we have a good size partner channel. One of the opportunities that affords our business partners is that they implement about 70% of the deals that our direct team sells. So that’s a nice source of ongoing revenue for our larger top 20%, 25% of our partners.

Louis:    So they’re kind of the professional services wing of your company, of your direct sales efforts.

Taylor:  You bet.

Louis:    So how different are the programs or content or campaigns that you need to provide the VARs versus those CPA accounting firms?

Taylor:  Well, when you start talking about outsourced accounting, the CPA firms have a natural benefit, which is that they have a significant number of small clients, many of whom are on products like Intuit and Xero. And so they almost have a built-in food chain of people that will raise their hand and say, Hey, I’ve outgrown QuickBooks online or another product and is there a better way to do this. And so that’s really about those firms educating their existing clients, many of them by vertical industry, of what they can provide them via outsourcing.

On the VAR side, much more complicated.  And I think one of the exciting parts about this podcast and speaking with you today is that it zeroes in on the single most critical idea, critical aspect of partner success and that is marketing. And I can tell you of my 20 plus years in and around this business, the top-performing partners are the best marketers. That’s not best marketing in terms of having the best brand or being known the most. It’s the simple truth. They’re the best marketers at having people raise their hand and say, I’m interested in what you have to sell.

Louis:    Oh, interesting. You know, I was going to ask you about this later, but since you brought it up, I’ll ask you about it now. Do you see a big range of marketing skills among the different partners that you have, and do you see a marketing skills gap between Sage Intacct and your partners?

Taylor:  Well, yes to both. And some of that’s size related. If you’re a small partner, you’re certainly going to struggle with marketing. We try very hard to provide a tremendous amount of resources from pre-done websites to obviously case studies to boilerplate material to videos — everything that a partner can need to at least get on the board, if you will. There’s a lot of work that goes on from there. Most partners seem to be reluctant or many partners seem to be reluctant to invest as much money as they should.

The analogy I like here is if you were a car dealer and you had billboards all over town with your phone number in it and you didn’t answer the phone, that’s the equivalent of running a campaign and having a terrible website. People come to your website every day to gauge, assess, and determine whether they’re going to do business with you. And if that website is not A, attractive, B, informative, C, have third party attestation — in other words, your customers saying great things about you. And four, speak the language of the prospect, speak the vertical language of the prospect and let people know that you’ve solved their exact problem before:  they’re one and done. They’re going to look at it and then move on.

Louis:    Yeh, for sure. The conversion experience, you know, the messaging that they get and the opportunities to start interacting with the company when someone comes to the website are really critical. And websites that are nothing but brochures are going to see 99.9% of the people who come just kind of pass like ships in the night.

Taylor:  And what people don’t understand is, you know, back in the 90s, and I’m going to date myself here, we did a lot of Yellow Pages advertisement. It was expensive. But somebody went to the Yellow Pages under computers or accounting software or whatnot, they found your name and number and they called you. And you at least at that point knew who they were. You had a chance to influence them. You could invite them to events. And look I know we can actually go and see who comes to our website and we can probably ascertain with some of the marketing technology who they are. But at that point they’re so far along in the buyer’s journey that in 90 plus percent of the time you’re too late.

Versus the person who found your name in the Yellow Pages. His buyer’s journey back in the non-internet days was just starting. And so I had plenty of time to recover from perhaps a poor first impression. Today where the buyer’s journey is 60 or 70% done when they’re contacting a business partner, hey, you know, if they don’t find my website attractive, informative and worth engaging with, it’s basically game over.

Louis:    Yeh, for sure. Because it used to be that vendors had all the information on the products and the industry and customers had to come to them. But now it’s all on the internet. So like you said, customers can be 60 plus percent through their research and creating their shortlist before they ever talk to anyone. And if you’re not on the shortlist from their research, that opportunity will come and go and you won’t even know it existed.

Taylor:  Exactly.

Louis:    So to what degree, when you’re working with partners on their business, to what degree are you focused just on helping grow their Sage Intacct business? Or do you try to be a resource to help them build their overall business?

Taylor:  As someone who sold multiple products, my answer might be different than others. So I’ve always looked at it as if I can help a partner grow their overall business successfully, that means that they have more money that they can invest in their Sage Intacct practice. So yes, at the heart of everything we do, we’re trying to make their Sage Intacct practice more successful. Most of them, most of our partners have legacy on-prem products from people like Sage or Great Plains or others. Those businesses can be cash cows to fund the move to the cloud. And of course what’s great about the cloud is that there’s an annuity model that they receive on an ongoing basis from renewing subscriptions year after year with their customers.

Louis:    Absolutely. That’s a very kind of forward-looking attitude that if you help them grow their overall business, they have a lot more to invest into growing your business too.

Taylor:  And look, if we didn’t have a great product that was one of the dominant players in this industry, if we weren’t competitive, if we weren’t one of the leaders in this, my strategy might be different. But because we do have a great product and great channel. And I got to Intacct when it was in 2010, it was about 125 people. Today well over 750 people. When I joined there were two of us on the channel team and today there’s about 50. So our partners see that we have the resources to help them. They like the business model, they like the product and so their natural inclination of course is to invest alongside us.

Louis:    So you seem to have a sense of urgency of a onetime opportunity that I don’t see in all industries. Last year you wrote “Together in the era where finance is moving operations to the cloud, we have a business opportunity with a limited window.” And you think this window will only be open for five to seven years. Can you tell me more about this opportunity, why you think it’s such a limited window, and what you’re doing to win it?

Taylor:  Let me clarify for the listeners: at the end of that five or seven years, the opportunity is still going to be as good. The opportunity today is unbelievable because only 15, 20, 25%, depending on who you listen to of small business have moved from an on-prem solution to the cloud. So this is no different than the movement — and thankfully at a less hectic pace — of people going from flip phones to smartphones, right. Or from a regular TV to a 4K TV. Some of these technology switches happen at breathtaking speed. Thankfully, accountants are much more measured. They’re risk-averse. So we’ve sort of had the first wave, you know, Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm. We’ve had that first wave of firms move to the cloud and they’ve been there for a significant period of time.

But over the time period between say 2019 — where we are — to 2025, 2026, we’ll see 80% of the market, 85% of the market move from traditional on-prem solutions to cloud solutions. So that’s an absolutely great place to be economically. Let’s say we get 2025, 2026, we’re at 80% then you’ve got the replacement market that then comes into play. But these next five or six years are like the early years of the gold rush in California.

Louis:    So you’re seeing it now — since you brought up Geoffrey Moore — you’re seeing the move from those early adopters and innovators into the mainstream market?

Taylor:  Yeh, we’re now at the pragmatic buyer who wants to make sure that other people they know has done this. That the cloud is going to last. That people are actually having success and that your uptime is good and the like. I was speaking with an analyst yesterday and I think we both made this point, which is Most people in the SaaS world are no longer talking about cloud as a differentiator. It’s assumed, right? Nobody’s out there writing on-prem software of any kind. So if you’re going to look at a new marketing solution or a business software solution, security solution whatever it might be, it’s just naturally assumed that it’s cloud.

And you know, in the early years in 2010, 2011, 2012 we talked about uptime, security, all of those things relentlessly. Are those important things to look at when you’re looking to subscribe to a SaaS solution? Absolutely. But most publishers are very transparent with those kinds of statistics in the background and the like, so that information is there where in many cases in the old days it wasn’t.

Louis:    Yeh, cloud has become the dominant paradigm now. I imagine there must be still a degree of laggards or perhaps companies in particular industries that feel they have to keep all of that on-premise, all of that financial data on-premise. But for the vast majority of the business world so much of their data is in the cloud now.

Taylor:  Yeh. And we’re used to it obviously in our day to day lives with buying things on Amazon, paying bills online and the like that again, while security, uptime are important considerations, you and I don’t go and say, hey, I wonder if Bank of America is up today because 99.99% they are up.

Louis:    Right. So you’ve written about the KPIs that vendors and partners should share. What are some of those KPIs and how often do you review them with your partners?

Taylor:  Well, the simple answer to the last question is we review them continuously with our partners, because that’s at the heart of our joint relationship and our joint business. So I’ll start in a little bit different place. I think that one of the most important metrics — and look it is an imperfect metric — is the net promoter score. So we measure net promoter score for all of our partners and we do that on a quarterly basis and we strongly, and we go out to their customers and do that. We have partners that certainly do it on their own, which we encourage as well.

We engage in our customers with a one-year subscription. So if I were to come in and sell you Intacct and implement it, when a year came up, you would have the opportunity to resubscribe or not. So when these are annual subscription as opposed to multiyear subscription, our partners and all the employees at Sage Intacct are maniacally focused on making sure that our customers are getting the value that they’re paying for and that they see it.

And of course the benefit of this is a real simple one. People tend to stay with the accounting software they use for a significant period of time, number one, and they tend to add to it as it goes. So not only does this mean the revenue stream becomes predictable, it also means that it is often increasing. We’ve stated publicly multiple times that our business without new customers would grow at greater than 10% a year net of churn. So that means that those subscriptions are going up because people are adding additional products, additional users and the like. I think then you can get into some of the more traditional KPIs and metrics, lead conversion rate. So, hey, you know, I registered 5,000 leads, but I only have two opportunities. Well then those leads were worthless because you don’t sell leads, you sell opportunities. Close rates are incredibly important.

When I started in the 90s, one of the things that fueled my business, was that people were changing accounting software every three to five years. Well today it’s every 8, 10, 12 years. And so with longer use cycles, that means that there’s fewer people buying. So close rate becomes incredibly important when you have fewer opportunities. Other things like days to close a deal, discounts that you had to apply to get a deal. So all of the traditional sales and marketing KPIs, I think, become incredibly important. But at the heart of it, you know, all of us should be focused on customer success.

Louis:    Well, that’s amazing that companies used to change their accounting software every three to five years?

Taylor:  Well and look at it. What was driving it was first we went from single user accounting system to multi-user. Again, I’m going to date myself with, you know, peer-to-peer networking. And then Novell came along and so people upgraded to client-server accounting. And then we had to move from DOS to Windows. In some cases at the end of the 1990s, we had the people who didn’t have a Y2K solution. So it was a great time to be because there were many external factors that were causing people to be forced almost to change accounting software.

Louis:    So obviously you’re a big fan of the Net Promoter Score?

Taylor:  Well, look, I think it’s, again, it’s an imperfect score and it is imperfect in its way that it’s executed because you and I both get emails daily — I just got one from Hertz — I’d rented a car earlier this week when we had an offsite meeting in Dallas. And it said 1 to 10, Would you recommend Hertz to friends and family? So you immediately know that they’re tracking Net Promoter Score. If you’ve done this enough and understand the mechanics behind it, you know exactly what they’re looking for. You know, they’re looking for promoters, not detractors or people that are ambivalent. So I find that part, I certainly find myself answering the question knowing what I do about Net Promoter Score. So that’s my point about it being imperfect.

That being said, customers who fill out Net Promoter surveys have an opportunity to provide written feedback, complaints, congratulations and the like, and so I think simply asking our joint customers with our partners, Now are we doing? What’s their experience like? All of those things are a great way to be focused on making sure customers are happy and that they’re going to renew.

Louis:    Yeh. Well, obviously you’re a lot more sophisticated about NPS than the average consumer is. You know that only a 9 or a 10 is a promoter.

Louis:    Yeh.

Louis:    I do think some companies overdo it by sending out those NPS surveys on every interaction.

Taylor:  Yeh.

Louis:    So how many partners does Sage Intacct have?

Taylor:  So on the VAR side, it’s a little over a hundred because we’ve decided that quantity is not the answer, quality is. We can only meet our goals if partners scale and are successful and continue to grow into larger partners. On the outsourcing side, we have well north of, oh I think 300, 350 partners.

Louis:    Okay, so your team has a personal relationship then with all of them. You have a channel manager who has a relationship with each of these partners?

Taylor:  Absolutely. You know those people are coach, confidante, consultant, salesperson, cajoler, butt-kicker, you know, all of those roles.

Louis:    Right. So Jay McBain at Forrester has said that the tech channel will be a shrinking proportion of total tech sales and that more of it will be direct. I’ve talked with some who agree with him, and then I’ve talked with people at other companies that are and plan to remain a hundred percent channel. I imagine it probably depends a lot on the company and even the industry. What direction do you see that going in your industry or for Sage Intacct?

Taylor:  I’m fortunate like you are to speak with Jay and interact with him, and I think Jay is a great collector of our collective channel experience and when he says something like that, I think he’s absolutely right. And then depending on what vertical or what type of software or what type of technology, he could be absolutely wrong. So clearly in today’s time where so many people can buy things directly, they can download it, they can implement it themselves, there’s less and less training being needed. The channel is there because, and I’m not a big fan of the word VAR, but it stands for Value Added Reseller and if partners don’t have a value-added then they’re just that one more middleman, the toll taker on the highway that’s not adding any value. So I think that part will shrink.

The great part about the accounting software, the ERP space, is in all my years doing this, there are very, very few people who can self-implement accounting software. They need assistance from people who know it, that have done it. There’s not a major on how to purchase, buy, implement accounting software. Most CFOs do it somewhere between two and five times in a 30 or 40 year career. So one of the things that makes the business software industry different around the channel is that that implementation and support expertise is critical to a customer having success with the product.

That being said, you know, Sage Intacct is an interesting test case being a hybrid channel. And we’re a hybrid channel because we can’t find enough business partners out there who sell and implement accounting software to cover the opportunity that’s before us. You know I’ve come from previous lives that were all channel and that’s great, but again, there’s simply not enough business partners out there today. Some due to consolidation, some due to the aging channel, which is a big issue and on and on. So we’ve chosen and have been very successful going to market in this hybrid mantle where 50% of our new sales come through our direct sales force and 50% come from our channel.

Louis:    Okay. So what technologies do you think are most important for Sage Intacct to help make your partners successful? What technologies, what channel technologies are you using: portal, PRM through channel marketing automation, others?

Taylor:  Well, we use all of those things and look, those are the quicker ways to communicate without having to do a lot of manual work. It allows us all to get dashboard views of our partners’ businesses. It allows them to work towards our agreed-upon joint goals or quotas. So all of those things allow us to have higher-level conversations with our partners around the results, the tactics, the work that’s being done, and not around spending lots of time figuring out where we are. So look, I think those technologies are incredibly important going forward. But again, they almost become table stakes to be in the channel business.

Louis:    It’s interesting you say that. I mean some people I’ve talked to have really seen just a big change in the last 18 months about how much more demanding partners are around the technology. And for example, How well the portal supports them. How quickly they can register an opportunity, get pricing, register a deal, things like that that some of the guests have talked about that they’ve had to really up their portal game to provide those kinds of services for partners.

Taylor:  Look, that’s exactly right because you and I both read the things, whether it’s B2B, B2C, where if somebody — and I had one of these the other day — I filled out the contact form two times and over two different days and didn’t hear back from anybody. So what did I do? I went elsewhere. So speed is important. Partners are busy people. We all know that making their lives as easy as possible is one of the things they value.

Louis:    Yeh, absolutely. So I’m going to ask you two questions that are kind of variations of questions that I ask when I’m hiring someone. First, what’s a channel program or a campaign that you’ve done that you think has been especially successful? It doesn’t have to have been at Sage Intacct. It could have been at another company. But one that you’re especially proud of.

Taylor:  So I’m going to go back in time a little bit. So we did one, my first go-round at Sage called the Hundred Hundred Program. Sage committed $1 million to helping partners first assess, hire and train additional salespeople. Because we believed at that point that the single most important thing that we could do is help partners get more feet on the street, more people selling our products selfishly. And so we from the very, from scratch, created this Hundred Hundred Program, you can Google Sage 100 Hundred Inc Magazine. They did a nice article about it. It’s got to be 15 plus years ago outlining the program, the different steps to it.

We hired a group to source candidates. We hired a group to assess candidates. We paid our partners, we provided funding so that they could pay these new salespeople. We did marketing campaigns so that those people could be successful. And we created the Sage Sales Academy to train those people. The return on investment was 7X. And look you know, lots of those people washed out. Lots of those people didn’t stay in the industry that long. But a good portion did and a good portion became very successful long-term salespeople.

Louis:    Oh, great. That sounds terrific. Okay. Now what’s a program that wasn’t so successful, that didn’t perform as well as you had hoped or expected and why do you think that was?

Taylor:  Well, one that immediately comes to mind that’s different is when we started the channel nine years ago from infancy with no partners, we had a great product and a partner agreement. We believed that partners simply letting people know via the normal channels, PR, referral marketing, and the like to their friends family that with the advent of the cloud was all that was needed. That people were keen to learn about the cloud, like you would be keen to learn about a new 4K TV or any other technology. That accountants would be as curious as anyone else to at least go hear what this new cloud thing was all about. You know Here’s the new shiny ball and I ought to go take a look at it.

And you know what, accountants are a different breed. They were too busy. The shiny ball was scary or whatever it is. And what it made us realize in very short order but nonetheless disappointing, was that traditional partner marketing and all the things that it encompasses from great website, from campaigns, emails, webinars, in person events, referral marketing, on and on, that those were actually more important in this new cloud world than they had been in on-prem days.

Louis:    Oh, interesting. Okay. So Taylor, what should I have asked you that I didn’t? What keeps you up at night?

Taylor:  So what keeps me up at night is making sure that we’re doing everything for our partners to make them successful. We have a mantra of Whatever it takes. One of the things that’s changed for me over the last number of years and we’ve been better and I’ve been better at sort of saying it in a much plainer fashion, which is our partner philosophy is If our partners succeed, we succeed. So if you believe that as our team does and our company does, then you would go about things in a way that we’re focused on building partners success. That doesn’t mean you let partners take advantage of you. It doesn’t mean that you have one-sided relationships. You don’t have economic models that make sense. But what it says is that you should be doing everything to help your partners succeed as long as they meet you basically halfway.

And to me, what keeps me up at night is we got rid of a partner in a top five city. So look, this is one of the 10 or 12 largest cities in the United States. Is one of the fastest-growing cities out there. And this partner after two and a half years had sold one customer. Well, if I were in that city with you or another channel employee, we would have 8, 10, 15 opportunities after two or three weeks. So clearly whatever they were doing was not geared towards Sage Intacct. So partners and working with partners, they’re not your employees. You’re always fighting for mind share. You’re always trying to make sure that they know that you have their interests at heart and that you’re trying to see them be successful. And we have lots and lots of partners that are tremendously successful, but you know, it’s hard. You spend time recruiting partners, enabling them — which has really become the backbone of partner’s success — and when they don’t succeed, that’s disappointing regardless of where the fault may lie.

Louis:    Yeh. And at the same time I’ve seen you write about how you have to have very positive constructive conversations and relationships. I think you talked about A, B, C, and D level partners in terms of how they’re hitting their KPIs and the conversations you have with them.

Taylor:  Absolutely. And I think one of the most important changes in the cloud partner models is that it allows you to have a different relationship. Because partners are the beneficiaries of building this annuity stream that comes from selling a customer now and reaping annuity benefits year after year after year after year. That’s why the Net Promoter Score becomes so important. But we are only as good as what we’re selling today. We look at it and say, here’s all the things we’re doing to help you succeed. What we ask in return is that we work towards a shared goal. You know, we call it a quota, we call it whatever we want. But we sit down every year, every month, every quarter, and review those plans with our partners of are you coming close to, are you attaining, are you exceeding those goals that we jointly set? Not my goals for you, not necessarily your goals for yourself. Your goal might be higher, but what we jointly agree that you’re capable of doing.

Louis:    Okay. So the business world is changing very rapidly, the channel world is. How do you personally keep up? Any particular podcasts, blogs, websites, events, publications that you think are especially important for keeping up with what’s happening in the channel?

Taylor:  Absolutely. And so, look, I can name some and I will, but I think there’s a piece that goes at a higher level than that. And I cajole and many times my team will tell you I chastise them. I think that all of us in this business have to be spending 30, 45 minutes, an hour a day, reading and listening and attending webinars, conferences about channels across all industries literally day in and day out. I’m always forwarding podcasts like yours to my team. I’m sending them to Larry Walsh’s site, Channelnomics, I’m going and finding resources that have been revealed. Consulting firms, whether they’re the IDCs, the Forresters, the Partner Pass, all those people who are publishing information about what helps make channels successful.

So business is about plagiarizing, right? And let’s call it what it is. We do every year, a business building conference. It’s a highlight every year. It is our partners teaching their fellow partners how to be successful. If you’re a partner and I go tell you what it takes to be successful, you’ll listen to me, hopefully politely, and you’ll find that interesting. But if our top partner or an up and coming partner goes and tells you the same thing and tells you in detail how he did it, you will find that to be more credible and you’re more likely to act on it. Well, the business building conference was an idea that Great Plains, at least in our industry, pioneered back in the 90s. And so we took the idea, we updated it.

So I just look at all of the information that’s out there. And many times what I do is take different channel employees and put them on one particular channel. So your job is to go read all of these three people’s blogs and synthesize it and then go and report back to the team or link to it. You three people need to listen to podcasts. You three people are going to conferences this year. There’s no way any one person can do it because there’s lots of information. And most important thing is there’s difference between education and action. Education makes us better. It makes us smarter. It rounds out what tools we have, but we always want to have a bias towards action.

Louis:    Yeh. Amazing how much you can progress if you study one hour a day.

Taylor:  Yeh. It’s crazy.

Louis:    Yeh. You can go quite deep into a subject pretty quickly.

Taylor:  And look and all it takes is one idea. So you know, nine-plus years ago, the greatest benefit I ever got was that we were starting from scratch. So we had a blank sheet of paper. So I went around to all the partners I knew, colleagues from the past, partners from the past, and asked a couple of quick questions. What do you dislike about being a partner with vendor X? What do you dislike about being partner with vendor Y? What do you think are the most important components of a channel program? And they told us and when They said we don’t like this about our current publisher, we did the opposite. So a simple one that I talk about a lot is we deauthorize the bottom 10 to 15% of our channel every year. And everybody gets a couple of years to make it, we’re not mean or mean-spirited about it. We sit and make sure that they know six months or nine months before that they’re not making progress and that we can work on a plan to have them remain being a Sage Intacct partner.

But at the end of the day the people at the bottom of your channel program are like an anchor on your program and they know it, you know it. They’re not going to be successful in their current incarnation and so you’re better to part ways. And you know what, that’s really hard to do. They’ve invested money. You probably know them personally and the like, but it’s the right thing to do. And I can’t tell you the response that something as simple as that statement gets in front of audiences, or writing or podcast and people send me a note and say, Hey Taylor, thank you so much, that was the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten. I’ve thought about it, but I’d never heard that anybody had done it. And I did it. And life is better.

Louis:    Yeh, I can believe that. Okay. So this has been terrific. How can people contact you to learn more about Sage Intacct or to give you feedback? Or your partner program?

Taylor:  Yeh. Well start a conversation, because again, I think I’ve always loved the saying that we’ve gotten here by standing on the shoulders of those who come before us. In many cases, the giants of the channel industry were the people that helped me get to where I am. I don’t know it all. My team doesn’t know it all. So I’m always open to conversations, whether it’s on LinkedIn or other vehicles. So the easiest way to get ahold of me is taylor.macdonald@sage.com.

Louis:    Okay, great. Are you very active on LinkedIn?

Taylor:  Yeh, absolutely. And you know, again, I find that LinkedIn is a double-edged sword, because it’s so much about building a brand and publishing articles. I don’t particularly like that part, but I like the fact that it’s a place for people who have like interests, you know, the old birds of a feather to come together. And then maybe go have that conversation via email or text or chat or good old phone or in person. Because again, every person that’s in the channel is facing the same issues across the wide variety of issues that we can face. And so I can go converse with somebody about the issues that I’m facing and find one good idea that can be a game-changer. And again, we know that knowledge increases when it’s shared and that’s our responsibility I think, to our partner communities and to our channel communities.

Louis:    All right, terrific. I’ll put these into the show notes at revenueassociates.biz Thank you for joining us today, Taylor. You win some kind of award for being my first guest to mention Geoffrey Moore and Crossing the Chasm.

Taylor:  Well that’s great. Thank you for having me.

Louis:    I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book as I do all guests in appreciation, you’ll be seeing some of the things in there that you know very much talk about some of the things that you brought up in the podcast today, like website messaging and conversion opportunities and so forth, and how important those are.

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