Janet Schijns joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

I’m excited to welcome my next guest to Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Janet Schijns is a go-to-market and profitable growth expert, board member, ecosystem growth expert, and megacosm guru.

As CEO of JS Group, a transformative market consulting firm, Janet is a visionary of the channel ecosystem; she is in charge of developing GTM plans and numerous 5-star, award-winning channel programs. Her approach is to manage challenges with a razor-sharp problem-solving skill set that delivers. Janet has the “street cred” and experience to close deals in business and operating models, sales channels, partner development, product innovation, digital transformation, robotics and automation, and ecosystem management. In this episode, Janet and I deep dive into why partnerships fail & how to fix them.

Let’s dive into the world of channels and ecosystems with Janet as she shares her expertise on the challenges executive-level managers encounter in channel strategy, marketplace predictions, the role of generative AI, market action planning, and fail-first strategy. She also discusses how to address the lack of women in partnerships, protect women from abuse through financial independence, and more.

What You’ll Learn

The reasons why the C-suite of an organization still struggles with channel strategy. (05.52)
The Chief Partner Officer’s role requires a unique set of skills. (11.00)
The importance of a CEO becoming a partner leader. (16.32)
Partnering is not just about the positivity. It’s also about the negativity. (24.07)
The future of the marketplace and the role of Gen AI. (31.37)
The importance of learning the fail-first strategy in market action planning. (34.07)
Challenging everything in the fast-changing world. (39.52)
Financial independence of women and safety from abuse. (43.25)
The possible solutions for the lack of women in partnerships. (47.10)
Advice for the second half of 2024. (50.31)

Quotes

“Your strategy for partnering is not about routes to market. It’s about the commercialization of innovation.”

“A good partner should be a part of your team.”

“You’re gonna see a world where it’s not always the best solution that wins. It’s often the person that dealt with risk best.”

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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos

Summary Keywords

Speaker 1

Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And on finding this buyer intent

Vince Menzione

you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant every

Janet Schijns

day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel

Vince Menzione

success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Manzi on your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. Today, I have a special guest here in the room. Janet shines, the founder and CEO of JSG and a leader in chattels ecosystems, and as she refers to it, mega chasms. We have an engaging conversation on all the topics you would expect us to talk about today, the role of the CPOE marketplaces, the resistance we’re seeing to partnership leadership within the organization, such an incredible leader. Such an amazing conversation. Janet, welcome to the new studio.

Unknown Speaker

Gorgeous. Thanks for having me. It’s amazing.

Vince Menzione

I am so excited to welcome you back. And we’re here in Florida, right.

Unknown Speaker

So perfect. The channel mob channel mob

Vince Menzione

is here. Look at this, we’re already gathered. Great to see everyone Jay kicked us off earlier this year, as only he can as only we he can. Michelle has been in this while Michelle hasn’t been in the studio. Michelle has been on the podcast, we’re gonna get her in the studio. And it’s been so much fun. So I’m so excited. You could join us today.

Unknown Speaker

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me

Vince Menzione

on. I’m so excited. As I said, I’m so excited. You are an icon in this world of channels and ecosystems. We’ve gotten to know each other well over the last couple of years have. And it’s a topic that we both care deeply about. We talk about often we both spoken at events, we’re going to be together actually, when this airs, we will have been together the same week, right next week. And I wanted to have you here because we’re at this precipice of time, and things are rapidly transforming. A lot of topics we’re talking about, we’re both talking about. And so we want to have you here in the studio. But first, there are apparently one or two people that are in our audience that don’t know Janet shine. So I was hoping maybe you could spend a couple of moments for those one or two people telling us a little bit about you, your company and your mission. Sure,

Janet Schijns

I’ll face them. How’s that has? For those of you who don’t know me, or maybe who do but want a reminder of like, what’s Janet up to these days, I’m Janet shines, I lead our amazing team at jSj. And we are going to market consultancy. So I’m going to start there and talk about what we do now. And then I’ll tell you a little bit of background about why you can trust me that I know my stuff. So we JSG have three practice areas. The first is a planning and research practice area. So we have I think the world’s best channel research team, we kind of as well bias bias. That’s where Jay and I get along so well, because our research team kind of picks up where Canalis and IDC And Gartner others would leave off right. So you see this great trend marketplaces, you hear events, talk about it so compelling and convincing. And then you say, what should my company do about it? I need some research done on what’s happening in my space in my verticals in my areas. And that’s where our research team comes in and does bespoke research. The second area, we have a sales and marketing, activation and enablement all channel all the time, because our mission statement at JSG is save the channel. Trying to save the channel. We did about 5 billion in funnel last year. Wow. That’s amazing. Not too shabby on behalf of partners. And then finally we have our channel Consulting Group, which is where you and I thankfully get to work together. Yes, yes. And that’s where we help companies either redesign their channel program or come up with their channel program. And now in a world where CO selling and marketplaces and everything is so big, we’re doing that. So why do we have the right to JSG to have those opinions and do that work? It’s because we are the folks who put on the fields or channel experts. We’ve all been channel chiefs. I was channel chief at Verizon, I was CMO at Office Depot. I was channel chief and CCO at Motorola. I’m joined by a huge group of people I won’t name them all who are with us who have done the same thing. They’ve been the CMO on the channel. They’ve been the channel chief in the channel. They’ve been out there they’ve they’ve won the wars they’ve they’ve gotten on the street. And that I think is the secret to our success is we go out and do battle with our clients. I love that anybody can be a PowerPoint, right? And our PowerPoints are beautiful my saying they’re not but we really know how to get things activated and get things going and we love to get out on the street and do the fight. Well.

Vince Menzione

That’s why it’s so important to have you here today because we talk happy talk sometimes about channel and partnerships. But the truth of the matter is it isn’t always easy to not and organised Asians still struggle here. Like I have phone calls. And I have DMS from people, it seems like every day I get a new one. Like I’m building a practice, we’ve been at it for seven years, something’s wrong, or leadership or leadership still doesn’t get it. Right. The last push

Janet Schijns

through on Costa channel again, again, yeah, I get those same texts, and it’s changing so quick. It is it is. So that’s part of it. Part of it is even the old dog channel leaders are having to learn some new tricks. And so you and I get a lot of calls because

Vince Menzione

of Yeah, and we were going to talk more about that as well. Some of the new tricks that they’re learning. Yeah, so some of those new learning. But why do you think organizations still struggle here? What would you say is the main reason? And we could I mean, you’re face to face at the board level? You’re talking to the C suite? Right? You’re with the channel chief, or the chief partner, officer, whatever the title is these days? Yeah. Why do you think that they’re still struggling? Increasingly,

Janet Schijns

it’s interesting. Increasingly, we’re being pulled in by the board or the C suite and not the channel leader. Yeah. Because so much is changing, right? Because so much is evolving, and they’re not sure what’s supposed to happen. And I think the reason why, so often there’s a little bit of a gap, I’m not gonna say disconnected, I don’t think it’s a disconnect. I think if you speak to the C suite, they understand particularly if they do 75% of their sales through the channel, that the channel is important to them. The disconnect comes from the fact that the channel chief has long been and excuse me, to our audience listening at home, the shit umbrella for the channel. Yes. So their job has been to hold the umbrella up. And no matter what the CFO said, no matter what the sales leader said their job was to protect the partners. Yes, right. So you hold that up, I did that I hit a very sore and defend and protect and defend, protect. And don’t let that hit the partners. Because let that noise hit the partners, they’re going to slow down and stop selling. The problem, though, is that umbrella also keeps the feedback from the partners getting up to the management. And so I think what happened in in protecting the partners, they actually over protected leadership. And so we just finished a survey, Dr. Ashton Silva, who’s the head of our research survey just did a CRO survey, interesting of firms that had channel leaders, and the channel leaders all said that the change in the channel was significant. That was the most common answer significant change in the channel, the CRO said some

Vince Menzione

change. Interesting that what they mean by significant significant changes in

Janet Schijns

routes to market and partners and how we’re going to go to market and how we’re going to partner right, as we dug down in the survey in our channel survey, which comes out later this year. The CROs while they saw some change, mind you some change, they did not see that overwhelming level of change. And again, I think it’s because that umbrella now is so lodged in place. They’re not getting that

Vince Menzione

feedback to transparency, isn’t there, no channel backup to this? It’s just not getting to the C suite. Yeah. Is it a translation issue as well, from the chief partner officer or the channel chief up to the C suite or maybe a lack of trust or protect

Janet Schijns

me games all the time as the channel leader, which a lot of folks in the traditional business have had to do thankfully, in some of the SAS businesses has been more transparent. But when you have to play that protect me game, it gets to the point where the channel chief is kind of covering their butt for the issues too, right. So I think it’s partially transparency. I think the other part is the C suite only specializes in channel during ops reviews. That’s right, and board meetings and earnings calls and they don’t specialize in the channel the rest of the time. And so what we’ve seen and I know I’ve shared this stat with you, but not probably with your viewers, what we’ve seen is in five years, we’ve went from 51% of the time a customer spends in a b2b tech purchase, being with a salesperson to only 14% of the time they spend with the salesperson. So is this motion that we used to have where if you added more sellers, both partners or direct sellers, you would get more sales? This was a common right has been something that that’s how everybody’s looked at the channel. Just more salespeople, we heard this right feet on the street reach. Yeah, you’re extending your coverage, right. We’ve all heard this reason for having the channel, right. Because they’re a sales channel. Well, now you’ve got a Microsoft who’s adding what 90% of their partners are adding aren’t transacting, that’s what we’re seeing this across the space it’s about influence and advocacy and and so when that starts to happen, it’s very difficult if you’ve been reluctantly in your C suite partnering in the first place. Now to let these people do even more and believe me, they are referred to for those who are in the channel listening is these people. A lot of C suite leaders

Vince Menzione

CFOs particularly love that’s Yeah, hello to all our friends

Unknown Speaker

out there, the

Vince Menzione

CFO, we’re gonna dive into the chief partner Officer role. So I don’t want to I because I think that we, what you’re uncovering here is it’s important. I think that we should probably, let’s go there. Let’s go there first, let’s go there first. Okay. I had Greg Serafin here just a few weeks ago from why chief partner officer. Yep. Different role, different role different set different set of skills? Yeah. We spent almost an hour and a half in the studio here. He gave us a masterclass and what he did he why taking them from a billion to about eight or 9 billion, he’s retiring. And so I think about that Chief partner officer, right, that role, I think the role that the nomenclature around the role is being overused and overhype, personally,

Unknown Speaker

when everybody becomes a CPO no one’s a CPA, no,

Vince Menzione

but no one’s a CEO. But I do think that there’s a new set of skills, a very different set of a different set of skills. And I look at a person like Greg is an example of that, honestly, who comes from comes from a financial acumen, right? Where the channel chief is somebody who maybe grew up in the channel maybe was at a vendor like a Microsoft or an HP or a Cisco experience sales experience, mostly. And the translation back to the C suite isn’t as fluid transparent, or as the conversations that are being had are not being understood the way they need to because they’re not in the language at the

Janet Schijns

time it skills. Yeah, wait, and we’ll talk on that the other half of the time, it’s just the culture of the company, right? The channel chief has kind of been this. I don’t really know what he does. But he does a lot. There’s very few. She’s I don’t really know when she’s out. We’ll talk about that. But they’ve kind of been cloaked in this little bit of secrecy. Right? There’s a lot of hugs, there’s a lot of mugs, there’s a lot of events, and they’re doing a lot of things, and they bring in sales, and the company says, hey, that’s good. And we’ll talk to you again and give you a hard time next month or next quarter. But this skill set has not been invested in no. So despite the fact that there’s so much change in the channel, and that the channel leaders see that what you see is still very traditional training, when we go in and do our partner expert training for teams. And that is really around how do you partner not just resell or give

Vince Menzione

me that word again? Partner, expert, partner, expert. Interesting. So

Janet Schijns

how do you partner? Right? What are the tenants of partnering? It’s interesting how confusing that is for some traditional channel organizations, because then they start to say things like, no, no, our product team handles that stuff. Oh, we have an alliances organization. And it’s in the Strategy Group. Exactly. We have a program group. And this is an interesting new trend that I’m seeing at variety of companies, including Verizon as an example where the program team for partnering now reports to the CFO, interesting in an attempt I can only believe to control money. So like a shadow organization for the partner organization. Well, it’s the actual program team. And they’re not the only vendor I’m seeing doing okay, starting to move that partner program your traditional triangles over lack

Vince Menzione

of trust in the channel chief thing, holding the dollars because we’ve

Janet Schijns

seen it in the past in marketing. We’ve seen it in the past in the channel, and we’ve seen it in sales, we’ve seen the CRO habit. Now all of a sudden, I’m starting to see a trend of it moving that or just the program. Yeah, moving to either some level of compliance. And we’ve seen some bad stuff happening. So I understand why or finance. And the reason I point this out is because partnering is now become something that’s all hands on the field. Yeah, it’s not just that used to be pretty simple, right? You want a partner, see the channel chief? They’re over there. Yeah. Now they have the partner program, right? They have a bunch of organizations, they run almost like a different company. They’re bolted on, they’re bolted on. They’re kind of this good thing that then we started having companies say we’re going to be 100% channel, they still don’t mean that. Now, they mean, they’re going to put sales through the channel on their paper. That’s right. And then we have companies like Microsoft, like E and y, like AvePoint, which I’m honored to sit on the board for who look at partnering as systemic across the organization, lipstick approach, holistic approach, it’s embedded. It’s not a separate thing. Right? Although they have a program and they have all the elements. It’s part of everybody’s job to partner and that’s the world we’re moving towards. And that’s where the skill for that CPOE that ability to reach cross organization. Greg has that skill, that ability to understand that there’s a bigger game than signing the PIO today. I was talking with Infosys. I’ll use them as an example. They’re genius at partnering. And they’re doing $7 billion deals with 37 partners in them. Wow. So you start thinking about the scope of partnering right? And in the past, you would have said, Oh, good, they’re gonna do the install and config and management. That’s not the case anymore. Right? These are really complex situations. And so the partnering, I actually think the next CEOs will come from the CPO well because partnering is so embedded now in what the go to market motion for every company needs to be well

Vince Menzione

I wanted to that was a big gonna be the next conversation point with you. So when Jay was here, and you were both at that same event in Miami,

Janet Schijns

we were and it was cold and windy in our in our state represented wasn’t it wasn’t

Vince Menzione

our typical Miami weather, but it was my birthday.

Unknown Speaker

I know it was it

Vince Menzione

was awesome. It was awesome. But Jay talked about The fact that every CEO needs to be a partner leader. That was his talk. And when he came here in the studio, and if you haven’t, if you haven’t watched or listened to that episodes, great episode as well, and we talked about this, why do you believe that CEO needs to be a partner leader? Well,

Janet Schijns

because I think I want the audience to think about 10 years ago, when we started saying every company is a tech company. Yeah, right. Car companies stopped being car companies, they started being tech companies, right. Tesla was iPhone companies were everybody’s a tech company. And that’s become true, right? Every company is primarily led by tech COVID, sped that up, or a platform company or a platform company? Within being a tech company? That’s right. But it was like, hey, everybody’s tech company. Now everybody’s a partnering company. So that’s the next evolution. We’re only at the tip of that evolution. Yeah. Right. So we’re not somewhere where it’s advanced yet. Yeah. And so what’s happening,

Vince Menzione

by the way, new jobs, new opportunities for those of us who are in the tech world extra venture outside of traditional,

Janet Schijns

gosh, we’ve been on compensated, you know, with Lynn and healthcare and others. And everybody’s partnering. Now, what’s interesting about that is some companies and I’m talking about you have been talking about, they’ve just named their channel, Chief CPOE. Because you’re supposed to have a CPOE. Much like what happened initially, when everybody became a tech company, they named CTOs. That’s right. And many times the CTO was just their CIO with a fancy new branding. And in fact, you saw a lot of people do CIO CTO 10 years before that, we saw the same thing with CISOs. Right? Originally, the seaso was just some guy who knew about security. Right? Then it

Vince Menzione

became Bob closet.

Janet Schijns

Bob manages our McAfee licenses, right? Okay, let’s make him Susa. That’s, and then it became a career of profession and a very difficult one. And the same was CTO. And now the think the same was CPOE. So we’re probably in year two of this trend, and it’s a 10 year get to maximize capacity ability. And so I think what you’re going to see is a lot of failures in the current CPUs the same way we saw when CMOS started this Yes, right, CMOs started, the average tenure was a year, right? Because everybody thought, I know what we need to cmo marketing, we’ll just get somebody, somebody who’s good at Marketo. Right, exactly. Like this is that who’s good at arts and crafts, they’ll be good at this, too. It’s not so much. And so we’re seeing the same thing that with the CPO and the skills are very different, right? The channel chief is about sales about partner management. Right? And it’s down. I’m managing you, Mr. Partner, Mrs. Partner. That’s right. The CPO is about managing up sideways down in circles saying how do we put something together that’s so exquisite for our customers through our partnerships with both our customers and our providers and our partners that we can’t be beat we can’t be replicated, and then turn that into a partnering platform, if you will, I think the two end up kind of Yeah, smudging together and make something that is that I can’t can’t think of another word. I said it already. But I’ll say it again exquisite for our customers. And we’re very early days in the very

Vince Menzione

early days. And we talked about Microsoft being prescient and being a harbinger of things. Microsoft has been good at doing this internally. Some of that is organizational. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. But some of it I talk about things like mindset, commitment, trust and execution is four areas when we talk about this CPO role, that I think we need a lot of work here, we need a lot of work. If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I build growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organizations that are resistant to change part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers builders ISV sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is it’s noisy. I don’t know whom to listen to and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard. We’re getting ready to open the doors early at a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder and innovator or leader, visit our website. Go back to Greg and Greg you’re getting a lot of kudos here today. But I think about the ability that info we talked about the influence strategy and the ability to be credible to have trust right with that leader, that partner leader All right, it cannot be the person who was the channel chief last week now just changing their title Well,

Janet Schijns

and that’s we’re seeing that right we’re seeing people say hey, let’s do that and what I’m trying to explain, explain or hell of the C suite and the board, I sit on several boards, right? And having that conversation being asked to present to other boards being sp, an advisor to a board on this topic is it’s not about routes to market. That’s right. That’s been trimmed up not to say you’re not going to have routes to market, right? Of course you are. But your strategy for partnering is not about routes, routes to market. It’s about commercialization of innovation. Yes. How will you commercialize innovation amongst your ecosystem? And that starts with a trust ecosystem. So who will you treat as a partner? And this gets them every time as well? And as poorly as you treat your own employees? Wow. Because a good partner should be a part of your team.

Vince Menzione

Yeah. What are what’s the answer you get when you ask that question? We

Janet Schijns

can’t do that, then you’re not ready. You’re not ready. You’re not ready. Right? Right. So how do you make that happen? How do you make it so that your partners, I want people to be confused about who works for which? Yes,

Vince Menzione

yes, this is right. This is the joint value proposition

Janet Schijns

through integration, right. And it’s multiple parties. And so what we’re seeing now is some heroes, we’re starting to see the Alliance manager. Yeah, who has long been tasked with this. Yeah, webbed, weird fuzzy roll, fuzzy roll, press releases and product releases and make trying to manage one of your biggest customers slash partners slash developer slash slash, they’re starting to rise up as heroes because this kind of nebulous territory has been something that they’ve broken their teeth on, right. And they do have a little more ability to work in the gray zone. And that’s the key the channel chief a lot of times and some of them will retrain, some of them will retrain and be fine. Right. I have no doubt to that. There’s always the exceptions. But the rule is, the channel chiefs have been in a black and white arena for a long time. And a

Vince Menzione

lot of it is the vendor partner role or vendor? Correct, which is more one sided? Correct.

Janet Schijns

And I am not so that the audience hears me not saying that the channel chief role goes immediately away tomorrow overnight, because that was the primary function, right is a primary function. It’s like, it would be like saying your direct sales leaders role is going to go away. Of course, that’s not going to go away. So any significant route to market that you have is still going to have a sales leader. That’s right. Right. That makes sense. It’s the layer above that. It’s the understanding that you could be in a sale. Yeah, right. And there could be 37. As I mentioned, earlier partners. That’s right. And so in that scenario, you don’t get to be in charge. And this is the hardest conversation I have, because the the C suite is so used to we’re going to let the channel sell that product. We’re going to give the channel this discount or give the channel this commission, we’re going to block the channel always my least favorite discussion from key accounts because we own them. news alert, no one owns an account what the Odyssey hear that? But those tenants, that’s right, right. They don’t work in a partner world.

Vince Menzione

And this is where my sales world, this is where the shift in mindset has.

Janet Schijns

And it’s very hard because then and especially my friends in the European markets right there. They don’t like stories, Americans like stories. We’re storytellers. They want like metrics and measurements and like, how am I supposed to measure that? And what I say to them is, look, I read your last 10 press releases where you made an announcement with whoever right name, your mega mega chasm is my term mega chasm, right? Rename your Mega chasm of partners, because I do believe it’s going to be a mega causal ecosystem, it’s going to be a microcosm. It’s, this is where we’re going. We

Vince Menzione

went, talking, you

Janet Schijns

know, system megakat. So you’re gonna go with a mega Kazam strategy. And your metrics already are messed up because I took your last 10 press releases. And then I went and talked to your head of sales. And I said, they allows 10 things. Well, with IBM, we’re doing this we’re doing this with Microsoft. Right all over the news. How many sales did you make? Not very many. And so you’ve been doing these press releases, you have been in effect partnering, you haven’t figured out how to commercialize that. That’s right. And that’s

Vince Menzione

where the alliance leader, the chief revenue officer, the CFO, this is where everybody, so this is that whole influence strategy, corralling that whole group together. And if you really

Janet Schijns

want to see everybody’s eyes roll, then you start to talk about, okay, so advocates who might be your advocates, who else is there who else you should partner with? Some of them are very unnatural. They’re not who you would naturally think, and who are your detractors, and they’re like, detractors, what do you mean? So I was just at CCA cloud communication Alliance, great event, by the way, and I was talking with a group of CEOs and CROs, and I brought this up and they were like, detractors, what do you mean? And I said, Okay, you all do stuff that’s ating collaboration and communication. Do you not think the CISOs a detractor for you sometimes or whoever their security consultant is a detractor for them making progress? That’s right. Oh, yeah. And how about the website guy whoever’s running their website and ecommerce Do you not think the website ecommerce provider is not a detractor for your service? You’re saying we could put chat bots in they have their own approach to it. Your Call Center application your seek has application fails Do you really think they like you and they just did a web campaign and they’re are getting judged on ROI. You have to trap natural detractors as partnering is not just about the positivity. That’s right, right. It’s also about the negativity and how do you manage the negativity? How do you lower the noise and the friction in the system? And that’s why I think they will be the next CEO because as every company becomes a partnering company, every company starts to learn to manage the mega caused them, the person who won, they’re going to be the most hotly pursued CEO ever. I

Vince Menzione

agree. I agree. And the CROs of the past, which are the ones that were not channel friendly or partnership friendly. I think they’re they’re going to be a dinosaur at some point. Why do you think they’re in the past? Because they don’t understand partnering? Oh, I

Unknown Speaker

thought you meant they work on already? No, no,

Vince Menzione

no, they’re still there. Unfortunately, they’re the biggest contract amount

Unknown Speaker

of them. Yes. That don’t know channel

Vince Menzione

because five or six years ago, they were successful at XYZ company. They took a SaaS offering, and they got it to, you know, X number. Right

Janet Schijns

and said, This is the sweetheart Yeah, this is who I need is my CRO. And then they went into a company that was 90% or 80. Security 91.5% channel? Yeah, involved, right? They went into a company like that. And then everybody’s questioning why are they struggling with partnering? But again, back to my original point, when we do our partner expert training, what we learn is most people have no formal training and partnering. No, they have formal training and Channel Sales being a cam, right? There’s cam training, right? This is not partnering training, right. That’s like saying you I don’t know you did. I’m trying to think of like one of those, like Zig Ziglar selling classes. Yeah, direct selling or prom hop. Back in the day, that sales training. Yeah. Right. And so they had a channel sales training, but they don’t have partnering.

Vince Menzione

They don’t have partnering train. Yeah, yeah. It needs to be a discipline at the university level.

Janet Schijns

Yeah. So interesting. You say that I’ve been having some conversations at the university level with the team at Wharton, because I did some executive MBA there. So about that about how do you have a partnering executive program like a graduate certificate program for partnering? Do I think it’s a whole undergrad at some point? Sure. But for right now, it would be good to have an executive management executive MBA program for these folks that need to be reached and you

Vince Menzione

pull in the multi disciplines, right? You pull in it pull in finance, marketing events, I’m happy to.

Janet Schijns

Right, exactly, you call in experts. And that’s what they do. I took the board training from Wharton, which is fabulous as an aside for anybody considering getting on board. And that’s what they do. They bring experts in and they explain to you what it’s really like. And we knew we need a lot of education. Yeah.

Vince Menzione

So we can riff all day all day. Let’s talk about mindset execution, executive commitment, because that’s this all ties into this. That’s the toughest one, but there’s a topic you were going to talk about together. I’ve been talking about quite a bit like the whole marketplace conversation, right? We’ve been talking about the tectonic shifts, what we’ve been seeing it the, again, the CEO, becoming the new CIO, and how that’s impacting these cloud decisions, right? You come out of the telco world of Vodafone, just signed a was it a billion and a half dollar commitment with Microsoft. Yes, they did. I know the person who executed

Janet Schijns

and they’re all doing that they’re all doing. This is happening. Yeah. So

Vince Menzione

now I’m in the line of business. And I’ve got this huge cloud commitment and a company and I’m talking to an ISV or a security company or somebody MSP, whatever, whatever the role is, um, I want to, I want to cobble it together, we’re talking about the whole marketplace concept here, right. And then last year, and Jay talked about this in our conversation, or five organizations got to a billion dollars or more with AWS, which made it AWS with the fifth largest distributor,

Unknown Speaker

I think it did. Yeah. And I think they’re on their way to fourth this year. Yeah.

Vince Menzione

So that changes, that changes things. But ervice, if you’re in distribution, you’re nervous. And somebody asked me yesterday, I won’t mention the name of the company. But it was somebody asking me for advice from one of the large hyperscalers was about what happens to distribution for us. What do we think about with distribution? So we can go in a lot of different directions, a

Janet Schijns

lot of different directions. And I think, yeah, the key to me was marketplaces is they’re not a panacea, right. You can’t just say, Hey, we’re gonna go on the Amazon marketplace or the Microsoft market and be done. Because you’ve got healthcare companies that have very specific requirements is you have highly regulated industries like utilities and telcos telcos right. And so I am seeing that not only are the hyper scalar marketplaces coming up, but so are the specialized marketplaces coming up. So you’re starting to see the centers and McKesson and other in healthcare, right kind of rising up, you see workday and Salesforce and others. And so I think there’s going to be almost to go back to our channel experience, almost like a triangle of marketplaces, right, that says, okay, at the top, you’re gonna have your hyper scalars for Pacific broad based marketplace, and then you’re going to have specialized marketplace and then hyper specialized marketplace

Vince Menzione

ties that caused them to if you think about it, because you have the hyper scalars and then you have the Galaxy solar system,

Janet Schijns

and it kind of comes into this mega chasm and so instead of being a triangle, It’ll kind of be a big circle right to kind of Yeah, just to gather, but what we see is that the folks that are ignoring that trend, and we do see it right, and I’m sure you see it too. I do, Hey, that’s not going to be us. That’s

Vince Menzione

it is a lot of the large ISPs still, by the way, because they don’t want to disrupt their channels of distribution. They’re just that and the 31,000 partners downstream. And the longtail what I would say

Janet Schijns

is, I’m gonna say it to the audience. It’s an an to strategy. It’s not an or Yeah, right. So it’s an ad strategy. It’s, I have a traditional channel, I have a traditional distribution, let’s face it, right? Breads, just bread with a toaster can’t be toast. So there’s hardware, there’s going to be hardware, right? That’s just reality. But there’s also going to be marketplaces and your customers like buying from them. And so we’re seeing more and more I think what I saw last week, I think it was from tackle and light, it might have been somebody else was 21% of the deals were being done by a partner. Yeah,

Vince Menzione

it could have been, I don’t know, tackle research, but on the platform, and Microsoft

Janet Schijns

is empowering that. So we’re gonna see in an strategy here. Absolutely,

Vince Menzione

absolutely. So lots of numbers coming out with regards to marketplace, right, our good friend Jay and the Canalis. Organization said 45 billion by the end of 2025. They said that they’ve under called it tackle who you just mentioned, right? He’s actually going to be here for our event in here on May 30. In fact, a little plug for our May 30. They’re saying 100 billion by the end of 2026. I’ve seen that number too. So where are we in a hype phase? Because I’ve been talking about the Marketplace moment, and I’ll be self inflicted maybe that I’m helping to create some of the hype speaking on stage at the at the channel partners event in some other places about this that everyone needs to get on board. But is it a hype phase?

Janet Schijns

There are certainly going to be winners and losers, right? So you might pick wrong in a marketplace, you might pick the wrong strategy, but it’s not a hype. It’s just early adopter phase. Right? And, and I know for some people listening, they’re like, we’ve been on a marketplace for five years. It’s not early adopter, it still is pretty early in the adoption early adoption cycle. And so who’s going to win and who’s going to lose? And I think we all can say Microsoft’s definitely going to win at the hyperscale or Amazon and Google, right, they’ve got so much investment. That’s right. And the other thing that we’re many times failing to realize is that with Gen AI, there’s almost this big bang moment coming, where Gen AI uses so much compute power, quantum computing leaps on top of that, and all of a sudden, the most precious thing in the world to every company becomes power. Yeah, because you got to power those data centers. compute power. And so what we’re seeing is Amazon now the number one provider of alternate energy, right, Microsoft talking about power there,

Vince Menzione

they’re putting their data centers near power, and your hydro seems

Janet Schijns

trillion dollar trillion dollar contracts for power struggle hyperscalers happening in the coming years. And what will happen is they will eat up the power. Yep. So even if you’re a specialized marketplace, you will end up in a hyper scalar marketplace, just from a consumption of power standpoint, because there will be no power left.

Vince Menzione

And layer on top of that, like Microsoft last year, $32 billion in cloud build out, right? They’re spending each of the hyperscalers is spending an inordinate amount of their investment dollars on chips right now. That’s right. That’s why the video stock is where it

Janet Schijns

is right? They’re buying up processing capacity, the the Achilles heel is power. So they’re buying up power, second, Achilles heels, chips break, as we saw what happened during COVID, absolutely got Intel building a monolithic chip manufacturer in Ohio, that will still only do about two or 3% of the chips that are needed. We need

Vince Menzione

a lot more chip capacity here in the US. What’s happening in the in China and Taiwan right now is still still

Janet Schijns

very far in parallel, right? And so I think you’re going to see a world where it’s not always the best solution that wins. It’s often the person that dealt with risk best. And in fact, when we go in and do our market, action planning, practice, shameless plug, it’s a great program. Our market action planning actually starts with failure, first failure. So what would be the things that would make you fail? How would you fail? How would your biggest competitor kill you? What would happen what and by the way, it’s a depressing strategy that I’m not saying it’s

Vince Menzione

another way that military organizations go through this strategy exercise, right? You fail

Janet Schijns

first. Right? So so we do fail first, and it opens up you watch the aperture and people’s brains open up around partnering particularly right and in the marketplace world around how they’re going to handle partnering in a marketplace driven Customer Self Serve world and they start to realize that their failure points are very different than their failure points would have been First Channel Sales. Yeah, right. Channel Sales was Oh, there’s another vendor comes in the partner likes their program better they pay more right. Those were the failure conversations. Now the failure conversations are somebody thinks an exclusive partnership with somebody else and we don’t have access anymore. That’s right. And our customers turn because all their money unless you remember, that’s how the marketplace works. Cio puts money into it throughout a commitment credits, whatever that specific marketplace calls it and you then get forced into that funnel. That’s right. And so when we do our failure planning, a lot of times, that’s how marketplaces then becomes in their plan. So when we do the optimistic planning, and by the way, everybody listening, you raise to a crisis, you walk to an opportunity, it’s human nature. So when we talk about opportunity, it’s always how do we grow? 30%? How do we grow? 100%? How do we get what why do we do this, you start talking about failure, all of a sudden, is Oh, shoot. And all of a sudden, it’s our contingency plan, right? So during the optimistic portion, marketplace was down low and a top 10 For a lot of the boards and CEOs. When you start talking failure avoidance marketplaces pops up, yeah, way up into the top five, top three, top two from any org. And this

Vince Menzione

makes the alliance leader more relevant to the conversation, because they’ve had the relationships with the Microsoft, Amazon’s

Janet Schijns

got the little tentacles in there. They know where the knock on what doors

Vince Menzione

and then the conversation about placing your bets across all three. All right, and on all three sets of Rails correct.

Janet Schijns

And then we start having the conversation about how the operate, what’s your operating model in? That’s right. And

Vince Menzione

that’s the piece where I feel that most ISVs at least struggle

Janet Schijns

struggle. And the first thing I always tell an HR loves me for this one. The first thing I always tell them is you got to get away from thinking of your operating model, like an org chart. Yep. And want you to think of it like a deck of cards. And you can play any number of games with a deck of cards, right? You can play Rummy, you can play solitaire, you can play whatever you want, right? But it’s a deck of cards. And in a deck of cards, you got to have kings and queens and aces and right, but you can play a different game with that. So it’s less about organization structure and more about the plays you’re trying to make, like that deck a car, right? And it really changes how people start thinking because they’re like, oh, that changes who my aces are, right? That changes to this partnering strategy changes here today, your ACE is our CEO, CFO, C CIO, CIO, CMO. Right? You got your Isa. That’s right. That’s right. But they’re not your aces anymore. So now how do you manage an org chart when your ACE is the Alliance manager who’s been there for 20 years and knows where everybody is buried at the biggest hyper scalar? So that’s, it’s really becoming an interesting full bodied conversation around operating model. We do our market action planning days. Do

Vince Menzione

you wind up with a new org? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s yeah, you

Janet Schijns

wind up with a new org, or at least a shadow org strategy, because operating model and that’s where I love everyone. But that’s where a lot of companies start with org model. And then they try to push operating model into a just start in the market action planning. We start

Vince Menzione

with like stuffing, like stuffing people or process into right.

Janet Schijns

And so I think that world of partnering is going to get away from that command and control finally, in corporate Yeah,

Vince Menzione

how do you stitch so the conversation? It’s very interesting. And then how do you change your compensation models? Right? Because one of the things I see from block from a blocker perspective, when you look at the existing organization, again, I like the panel, like we have to get to the rallying cry around the market place. Absolutely. But today, I have an alliance team that’s bolted on over here or sits here. I have the channel team we like to use the term bolted over here revenue, right?

Janet Schijns

Kind of program team somewhere program marketing, maybe

Vince Menzione

finding you’re not on the same comp plan. They don’t have the same OKRs they’re not they’re not aligned the right way. Right. So they have to you have to change the composition.

Janet Schijns

Right? You have to change the comp I tell people like parenting. Yeah, got to decide what’s important first, right? Don’t don’t focus on anything else. Just focus on what’s important. What

Vince Menzione

matters. Don’t

Janet Schijns

do drugs and get an education right, then get a job. Those are the three important things your rooms messy, I don’t care. Yeah. And so this is same thing for corporations. They’ve spread so thin what their metrics are. Everybody has 10 different metrics. You look at most people’s comp plans, you’re like, I don’t think they have any idea what they’re doing to your stock price. Like, let’s be honest, let’s just be transparent here and say that the person in Channel Sales, your organization, probably not having a massive impact today on your stock price. Not today, right? Maybe in aggregate over time. Sure. But so what we’re encouraging people to do is to actually dumb down the metrics. Yeah, make sense? Make it simple, make it simple, what are the three big things that are going to that are going to drive the organization forward get rid of the noise in the past, it used to be like earnings per share, and then it was margin or some level of which right and a comp. That’s the other thing I love and it was a comp against others, right? It’s always a comp. And now we’re starting to encourage people that you can’t look at your company the industry you’re in you have to look at part of your comp has to be where they are in partnering. Yeah, so I think we’ll see Microsoft added as a comp for a lot of folks and some of their metrics.

Vince Menzione

Okay, very interesting to see what they do. I would love this is a fun conversation. We’re gonna have you back here

Janet Schijns

very like I know it’s very very it’s like a mind meld.

Vince Menzione

It’s a mind mountain or Star Wars person’s mind no, we’re gonna bring our two d two or one of the one of your friends with us

Janet Schijns

next time. But yeah, it’s it. The world is changing a lot. You’ve got to challenge that you don’t need a faster horse. Yeah. So you need a car? Yes. Right? So Right. And so you have to challenge everything in that scenario.

Vince Menzione

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Janet Schijns

an amazing advocate for all of us. You’re very kind. But

Vince Menzione

I have also been very deliberate because I feel that all voices need to be heard. Yes, I agree. And yeah, we’re moving out of the bro culture of this tech world that unfortunately, when you go to some of these conferences, yeah,

Janet Schijns

I was gonna say a lot of the conference’s I go to the the the bro code is still code is still there. Yeah,

Vince Menzione

let’s talk about that for a second. Because I do feel like we were at dinner the other night and was asked about women in technology. And I the observation from the person who wasn’t in it was that there are Hey, there’s a lot of women in tech. And I sit there in mostly traditional roles. They are there and head of HR Head of Diversity, CMO, legal

Janet Schijns

finance marketing. Yeah. And then we saw them impacted the most by layoffs. Yes, those roles are the easiest to replace with AI as well.

Vince Menzione

So let’s talk about our world. Yeah. Why don’t we see more women leaders in this industry be a C suite role. So at the C suite, why don’t we have more women leaders, running the partnerships, alliances, channels, and ecosystems microcosms and making columns?

Janet Schijns

Yeah. So to start, and I know, you know, this, I launched advancing Leadership Network with Kathleen Martin joined our team earlier this year to help mid level management, females go to the next level. That’s where the break is, right? The break happens in the mid level management. It’s a manager or director. It’s

Vince Menzione

like a glass ceiling, I use that term glass ceiling, but it does feel like there’s a

Janet Schijns

ceiling. Yeah. And you’re held, you’re held down. My family also took a significant portion of assets and created a for profit, one, one, and we are sponsoring and giving scholarships to women. A significant portion of our wealth and my husband and I said if my I gotta put my money where my mouth is free, and so let’s start a foundation that’s going to help women get to find it. And to me, it’s about financial independence. Yes, yes, it’s good for the industry. It’s good for everybody. But when women succeed, and women become leaders, they become financially independent. women that are financially independent, are nine times less likely to be abused, and I’m a survivor of abuse. And so I know how important it is to be able to get out. And so we’re really dedicated on helping women get ahead, not just because it’s good for the industry, but because it’s good for women and their families when they’re in danger. I didn’t know that. Yes, yeah. Yeah. In my past, long in my past, my past, we can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. Yeah, please, if it’s happening to you, please text me Call me or text or call Vince and we’ll get you help, please. So one of the things that we’ve seen is why women don’t get ahead is is also partially sadly, why they are more likely to be victims of abuse, why they’re more likely to be not financially independent. Women are the care providers. They have the children they have the parents, they have they’re sandwiched in between this, and the channel traditionally has been a heavy travel. Yes, very much. So the higher you get in the organization, the more you have to travel nationally, if not International, all the events, right to an endless plethora. have events all the late

Vince Menzione

nights out at the bar late nights at the bars.

Janet Schijns

And I hate to say it with your tush being squeezed and people coming onto you because they’re drunk. Yeah. And so it gets lovely. It’s uncomfortable, and it doesn’t match up with unfortunately, still the primary role, which is care providers. Now there’s some families where that’s not true where everybody’s pulled together where they help but look at them as beans, right, they’re definitely, they’re definitely breaking that norm. They’re both equally responsible for these kids, they get a lot of community help. And plus

Vince Menzione

COVID has made it so we’re just talking about to start to vary the time, right,

Janet Schijns

and then events started coming back. And so I think the number one reason has been that women were felt excluded, because it was all guys, then they were excluded, because it just didn’t fit in to the average, being very transparent. I’m a mom, the average moms journey to travel to 117 events a year. And then third, the financial rewards really weren’t as good for women, women typically got less money for the role, they typically more promoted slower were comped lower. And so in the past, women didn’t choose channel. So as they started to rise up, they either moved over and became the channel program lead, they moved over then again to marketing, as they were in the marketing or sorry, moved into marketing, they may partner marketing, partner marketing, then maybe they became a field marketer, then maybe they became CMO.

Vince Menzione

Yeah, I’ve seen that path

Janet Schijns

to CMO. Right, that path took talented women out of the channel. And it’s a shame because now we’re in a mode of partnering. Yeah. And from a EQ standpoint, women are

Vince Menzione

much better here. Right? Women are better

Janet Schijns

at sorry, part of the soft skills, right of the being able to bend not break and compromise not cannot conquer us, right? And so we’re seeing this, oh, goodness, right, we have this huge gap of women who actually have the skill to do the job, but haven’t had the experience doing the jobs. So what

Vince Menzione

can we do? I mean, we’ve got our viewers and listeners and people that watch us on LinkedIn, YouTube and other channels. What can we do differently? Well,

Janet Schijns

first thing is mentor somebody, right? If you can, if you’re experienced, if you are a channel leader, if you’re a partner leader, if you’re an ecosystem leader, pick a female and mentor them. You’re amazing at this, if so many women under your wing and help. The second thing is be their sponsor, when ideas for roles are different than mentors, different than mentor right mentor means I’m going to provide you a structured help sponsor means Hey, we need a new partner at least. And you advocate and say, Hey, Jenny, would be great for that role. Right? Here’s why I think she’d be great for that role. Here’s why I think you need to do this. And don’t be afraid to push it.

Vince Menzione

And you’re in the boardroom. So that’s that’s where those conversations are they do should happen.

Janet Schijns

Oh, they do. Yeah. And I put my foot down all the time. And we’ve actually now really we we do have to was I mentioned save the channel is our tagline. And so we won’t work with anybody on a channel project where it’s going to hurt the channel, right? If it’s going to really negatively impact the channel, we will not take that contract. That’s always a surprise to people. But I am not destroying the partners that actually are the lifeblood of the business. There’s a way to do projects and change your channel strategies and ecosystem and partnering strategies without hurting your partners. So if companies aren’t open to that, I’m not for you. They off 99 times out of 100 they come back and go we were wrong. Shouldn’t went that way. You were right, let’s let’s go back to the table and do it the right way. But we also now are saying, Look, if there’s no women at the table, there’s no diversity. No people of color. We don’t really want to work with you. Yeah, good for you. And so that has really changed some conversations, I get a lot of calls now. Transparency, I also get a lot of calls that people think I have a can of women that I can just like, open up and pick one out. Here you go. She’s already for you. She’s just been waiting in the can for you to call

Vince Menzione

and start a recruiting business. They’re just I guess I could Yeah, but it doesn’t work

Janet Schijns

that way, right? You’re gonna male or female, you’re gonna have to invest in the person having the partnering skills for Scorpio, you need to have a bench. And I would almost argue that the person who wasn’t the channel chief is a better candidate. Yeah. And so since most of the channels use are male, find the other person who was good at partnering and got sidelines maybe a little bit right, and maybe they’re your next CPO and you can do some kind of to in the box or CO management scenario to help them get the experimenter

Vince Menzione

advocate look for talent. Look, I think about the baseball team right you got to have the you got to have the farm team. Yeah, there was a bit

Janet Schijns

I don’t remember who wrote the book but there was a book about you just just hire people and then find them the role find them the role hire great people hire great people then fire them. Right and so I keep a collection, I do have a little database I keep of women that I’ve seen skills, I put the skills in, we’ve turned it into a database so I can input what somebody’s looking for and say I think this person is primarily ready for that. Yeah, yeah.

Vince Menzione

We’re gonna run out of time we are. So we are almost To the midpoint of 2024. Reading, I can’t believe it like it was just New Year’s Eve here,

Janet Schijns

like, Florida. Sure. Happy New Year, seven seconds. Exactly,

Vince Menzione

exactly. What are you seeing? How should we each prepare? What should we be doing differently going into the second half of this year? What great advice or strategy? You request?

Janet Schijns

Yeah. We had a silent recession in 23. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Right. You all know it’s true. We just didn’t talk about it. And there’s economic

Vince Menzione

headwinds 470,000 people laid off last year. Right. Right.

Janet Schijns

And we’re I think, and if you’ve watched layoffs, I do. I think we’re over 100,000 Already this year in the tech space in the startup space not over. It’s not over fact that big ones are just starting right Tesla yesterday, right. So I think the economic uncertainty continues at least through 25. I don’t care what the pundits say, right? You’re gonna see a pop because of the election, get ready. If you need to get a mortgage get ready. Because you’ll have a little window right before November where things will come down. The interest rates will come down. Exactly right. So just personal advice, get ready,

Vince Menzione

refinance, if you’re at

Janet Schijns

a time worried about October, but on top of that, we’re gonna see tack continue to grow. Yes, it’s just where it’s growing. And where it’s declining, right, we’re gonna see generative AI really swap out finance teams, core, repetitive tasks, teams, contact centers, so we’re going to hear these big numbers 30% laid off 25% laid off, right? But it’s going to be in those routine tasks easy to replace to the machine area. Yes. And any partner who’s not involved in generative AI not using generators and understand it will be making a huge mistake, huge mistake basically signing their termination papers. Yeah, we’re gonna see marketplaces continue to rise. The biggest reason is because it lets you compare and contrast offers. That’s right, and manage costs, manage costs, and in the current financial aid streamlines the process finally, process, manage costs, this is a good thing. The third thing we’re going to see and we continue to see, marketing is leading the way in sales. Yeah, the firm’s that get it and we just finished a study on this, the top growth firms in our industry, invested more in marketing and got more leads for marketing than the bottom growth companies who were still trying to push the sales mantle right, hire more salespeople, hire more salespeople, this is a failing play. It is a failing, you could in fact, and we have the data to prove it, let go of half of your sales team spent half of that money. So you’re still saving money on marketing, and double your sales. Absolutely. This is the world we’re moving into self serve world where you don’t learn on their own and marketing as who helps us we’re gonna see this huge pump of marketing. And then we’re going to begin to see the pushback on partnering. Yeah, so right before you push through any innovation, you’re gonna get the resistance, you get the resistance, right. That’s how you know you’re there. Yeah, right. A little. Like when there’s no resistance. You’re not there yet. We’re gonna see. I think it’s going to be early. We’re birthing. We’re birthing and the 24 beginning of 25 You’re gonna see some massive pushback on partnering. Yeah, right. A little like, No, right? No, and then it’s going to pump through and it’s going to be just crazy. So if you’re not partner enabled, get there. Yeah.

Vince Menzione

I love it. Janet, you are so so good to have you. Oh,

Unknown Speaker

thank you for having me. Well, we’re

Vince Menzione

gonna do this again. Yeah, so we’re gonna get you back here in the studio with you. Janet shines. If you don’t know her, you need to know her JSG or the JSW group is it was formerly known incredible. organization.com like to CRM is an amazing friend. And so so good to have you here. Bear

Janet Schijns

with you. I love what you’re doing. Thank you hear everything you’re doing to champion and save the channel.

Vince Menzione

Thank you, and you’re a mutual admire as well. Really appreciate you. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feature amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partners

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