Technology in the Channel

Kyle Burnett, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Allbound, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss the birth and growth of the partner portal, navigating channel tech, integrations, SaaS partner programs and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.

Jen: Hi everybody. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you know I don't typically sound quite this froggy. I'm getting over a cold, I actually sound way worse than I feel. And I'm actually in a pretty great mood, and one of the reasons why is today's guest is none other than Allbound's own Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Kyle Burnett. Welcome, Kyle.

Kyle: Hi Jen. I think your voice sounds awesome and after this, we're going to karaoke because I think you've probably got a pretty good voice for it right now.

Jen: Oh my gosh, I think if I do that I'll have no voice at all in the coming weeks. After this podcast, I think I'm going to go on a vocal rest. Is that what artists call it? Vocal rest? So this is going to be super fun. Typically on the podcast, we have folks in sales or marketing and always with a channeled focus, of course. But I want to add your voice to the mix because there's a pretty big role that technology plays in the channel. And, also I think you're pretty awesome.

Kyle: Well, thank you. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a fun topic, too, because technology in every sector of business is kind of at the forefront. It's hard to turn on news and not see stories about technology, technology companies, what they're doing, what's trending. And what I do love about your podcast is you're a great resource and support for sales and marketing people because it's not the headlines that you see every day. Technology winds up being the focus. So it'd be kind of fun to swing this back around a little bit and see if we can really focus on the cross section of those two.

Jen: Absolutely. So let's just dive right in. I want to start with a Channel Partner word that I honestly kind of have a love/hate relationship with. It's the word "portal" or "partner portal," and I can explain a little bit later on why I have this love/hate relationship with it. But Kyle, can you put on your professor hat for us here and kinda walk us through the birth and the growth of the partner portal? Because every person who I have on the podcast, almost all of them...they either have or want to have or talk begrudgingly about their partner portal.

Kyle: I'm sure. Yeah, I'm kind of like the wiki on that, and I think that sometimes the word's so loaded and we can take pieces of it and maybe think about it positively or negatively. But I think if you just back up the story and where the portal came from, it's really no different than every other portal that exists on the internet.

You know, pre-internet, how did you communicate with partners, with business partners? You printed and mailed things to them, newsletters, for example. And you had to print and mail other collateral and information that you needed them to have - data sheets, board papers, case studies - whatever you needed your partners to have, and that was print and mail.

Pretty soon that turned into digital files that are online, so instead of sending a newsletter you can email a newsletter. Instead of sending files, you can email files or links to files. And pretty soon you start aggregating that into one location online into, well, a portal.

And now you can actually switch and have that be more of an on-demand scenario where partners can come and get it when they need it. And it pretty much just follows the history of the internet in general, having information that you wanted to share and how do you just get it all congregated, aggregated to one location so that it's there on-demand, and that's kind of where the portal came from and actually where it just ends to where it exists today.

And I think to hone in on the love/hate piece of this, what we don't like about where portals exist today is that still implies that it was the portal that came in 1997 when the internet started to really take off. It feels like it got left in time, vs. software, which is ever evolving, changing, and growing. And I think that's kind of where Allbound sits is right there, and where a lot of companies, you know, what they're looking to in the channels to try to figure out how to actually use technology and how to actually use software and they still call it a portal. And so we look at that and we want to address that and say, "Wait, are you thinking the portal? Or are you actually just thinking software?" But that's where it came from and it's, to some degree, better or worse, where it still largely sits today.

Jen: So, when I think about why I have this weird feeling about partner portals is, I love the idea that organizations are investing in making a resource, allocating a resource for their partners, and providing their partners with the location to go to to be able to access information, I love that. What I hate is that I feel like portals are this place where marketing collateral kind of goes to die.

And the other thing is I don't think I've ever talked to anybody who says, "Oh my gosh. We have the best partner portal ever. It's amazing. I love it." It's like, not to follow this house or room theme too much, but it's like this room. And there's all this furniture in this room and artwork, and none of it really goes together, but it's all there. Is it better to just to have the room? Would it be better not to have it at all? And so, that's where my conflict, I think, comes into play.

Kyle: Well, maybe there's a bunch of gothy millennials who have moved into the channel now and they really like this idea, and they like the idea that there's this really dark portal that's like a cemetery of marketing content and so they just want to hang out there and smoke some cloves. Maybe we're onto something. Maybe we should keep going with the portal because it'll become trendy and cool again.

But you're right, it is that feeling that it is a wasteland. And to some degree, it's kind of true. It's like you put content up there, you make it accessible to somebody. And that's great. The first time they go get it, they pull it up, they're like, "Awesome, great. This served this need that I have right now." But it does become very transactional. And it kind of lives and dies by the need of the transaction. And it doesn't really take on any other life form of its own. It just sits there, it just waits. And that serves its purpose, but that is, in scale and in scope, a very limited purpose and that's painful for the business-minded marketers, such as yourself, that actually want to invest your precious resources in something that's got a bigger, longer, more valuable life span than just transactions.

Jen: And there's this other piece about it that kind of leads me into the next question I want to ask you about, and it has to do with technology. And I want to ask you about integration. But before I do that... So, the other way that portals are used, besides just to hold content, right, it's almost like a place to go to then access other systems.

So maybe I go into the portal and then I can access a lead or deal registration system, or then I can access a marketing campaign type of system. And I start thinking about from the user experience perspective, like how do you make sure that you're able to maintain a consistent user experience? Or are you leading someone through this portal and they're, like, literally going through this magical kind of realm and then they end up in this other system? And how can they cleanly get back to where they started? And I think that's one of the other challenges that I've seen come into play besides just the content piece.

Kyle: Yeah, it's like they need a treasure chest map, a crayon to help work their way through it. But when we invest in technology, especially in the channel largely for two reasons. I think the other challenge is that the channel leaders are looking to bring systems together and perhaps portal is kind of this place where they start to think, "Well, I've got a portal. Can I also add this there? Can I also add that there?"

But if you simplify it, back up to, like, two commonalities there, one is, they are looking to simplify process. And they're also looking to speed up and simplify their own lives and that of the lives of their partners. And so, once they move beyond, "I've got content," and things to share with them, they do start to say, "Well, I also have this process. I've got this."

So it starts to balloon out from there and it's tricky. I mean, as a person who likes to build systems and tie systems together, I know that it's very easy to engage in that scope creep and engage in that idea creep to go, "Well, just one more thing, just one more thing, just one more thing," but that is how most people's portals and systems were built, was just one more thing over a couple of years, over a couple of different regimes, over a couple of different technologies. And pretty soon you do have, as you've alluded to, that house of horrors and rooms and things tied together and no one even remembers why they got added on and why that was put there. It just becomes very weird when the guest shows up and is not quite sure how to navigate it. So it can definitely become legacy very quickly. And those challenges exist, but that was born out of great intentions, and that was born out of great promise and it was born out of great opportunity, but it does need to be revisited. It can have a very limited lifespan if you're not careful.

Jen: So, when you're working with a customer and you'll come into the conversation because there are systems that need to communicate with each other, at their core, what are some of those challenges? You mentioned aligning different processes. Let's lay it out there. Like, what are those processes that the majority of channel teams are looking to overcome by integrating their systems?

Kyle: That's a good question. So, what I think is consultants...what you always like to do is focus on the business objectives. You really try to back the story up and say, "All right. So how is your business? What's the state of your business? What's the size of your business? What are your objectives to help grow that business? What are your metrics where you gauge?" You are trying to back that up to the investment they're looking to make and the resources that they need to accomplish their job and then what would they use to measure success, what constitutes success.

Well, the ROI of business technology using channel is pretty much about simplification of process and maximizing of their limited resources. So that's definitely a commonality. And the problems that kind of prevent you really trying to help focus on simplifying that is that they have lots of systems, they're disconnected, there's too many features. In the channel it's really easy to say, "I also need this, I also need this, I also need this." So if your feature list gets really long, that's a challenge that channel chiefs face.

Then, because there's the waft of technology kind of takes together those repetitive feature sets or competitive feature sets, then you get different technical stakeholders of each of those systems, and you've got all of this that you're trying to maximize and make the most out of with budget constraints. And that's quite a challenge. And it's a lot of a challenge for somebody to face who, inside of their own channel, has kind of their own core values in what they do and what they bring to the channel. And it's probably not navigating all of those problems to achieve this technical outcome when really they're like, "I'm here to lead people and lead teams towards business objectives, not figure how to get this system to talk to that system and get past the people who own those things."

So that's quite a challenge. And that's actually a fun one. What I really enjoy and what my team really enjoys as technical consultants is working with smart marketers and smart business people to analyze what they've got, and just sit down and draw it out, and draw up the process, and draw up the flow, and keep focusing on kind of their core business objectives and their metrics for success, and really focusing in on the ROI that they need off of their investment. And that ROI more often than not, is simplified down in terms of that it takes less resources to accomplish the processes that they need to show that what they're spending then works.

Jen: I know when you're integrating systems, you're typically integrating with an organization's CRM. What is the typical use case that you're looking at? What type of data are organizations needing to move from one place to the other? So, what's kind of standard? And then maybe can you share something really cool that either you've seen someone do or that you're anxious to see someone do? That would be kind of neat to hear.

Kyle: Sure. I think that really what the channel's trying to accomplish is the same thing that direct sales is trying to accomplish. And sometimes we lose track of that. We lose focus of that because of the disconnect, because instead of my sales people being right across the aisle, and instead of us all being in the same break room, we're in different locations. Well, big organizations have lots of sales teams working across cities, across countries even. So it's actually not all that widely different, except that technology hasn't really kept up with that style of relationship. So CRMs haven't kept up with that.

The cost of growing through your channel, doesn't align with the way that you can scale a CRM with your business. They figured out the CRM price point based off businesses scaling, and the market teams to be okay with that. That doesn't carry over to the channel. And so I think what winds up happening is the channel is kind of stuck there needing, essentially, a lot of the same CRMish functionality, specifically since they're sharing leads and registering deals back and forth and co-selling with partners. Whether that happens on one side or the other, leads being referred in for the supplier to be working through to a successful sale, and then just kind of reporting back to the partner where it is, or asking them out, letting the partner work and report it back in. Either way, they just need this collaborative effort going and sharing of information along the way of "Where is this? How is it going? How can I help?" CRMs haven't really helped with that when you're having people outside of your organization performing those activities with you.

So largely, what channel teams that we work with need is, they need the ability to collaborate with their partners on prospects from gathering them, to educating them, getting them up to speed, moving them along through the process, converting them to customers and then supporting them after they become customers, and keeping that relationship alive with all three of those parties involved. And that's what they're trying to solve for with a handful of different systems, and not necessarily the resources in house, not necessarily the descriptions that they needed the technology to help with that, and possibly not with the technical resources they need.

So that's what we see. And when we get to come in and help with that, it is to help them understand what it is that they've got now with tools they could be using now and how they could augment that tool set and fill in some of those gaps and really leverage a handful of different technologies to accomplish what they've got, some of those technologies they already have, and maybe some of them they have and don't even need. It's a fun discovery process. But you process-flow that out with them and it really helps them wrap their head around this data that's moving between systems and between organizations that is largely invisible otherwise.

Jen: And I threw two questions at once, which is annoying, so kind of the second part of that was just if you have any kind of anecdote, like anything really nifty, like a really cool example of something that you're seeing folks do with integration or what you'd like to see someone do?

Kyle: Oh yeah. So I guess there's kind of a positive and negative I'd throw at that, which is that technology, where it sits today and where integration sits today, gives all of us this idea that it can all be done. I think we were visiting a client here recently and they were talking about their technology being "not Hollywood-ready." So they have opted to focus on selling into businesses because businesses understand what the reality is of technology right now, vs. the rest of us who go watch a film and just think that Iron Man could build his suit very quickly over the weekend to be ready for the aliens coming in.

So we have this expectation that everything is horribly complex and really terrible and really important and all of these, like, superlatives, all of these really strong words, but then can also be really accomplished very simply and just, "I'll get this system and talk to that system and do that," so there's a lot of magic inside of there that should just happen. So I think the work implies that the best thing is when they have this realistic understanding that anything is possible, but also understanding what you really need to be doing and focusing on that.

The things that I really love is when we see simplicity, something as simple as tying together your marketing automation system - and I won't use the word portal - and tying in your channel software that you may not even need to necessarily have APIs talking to APIs and moving a ton of data back and forth, because there just may be simple stuff that you can do with existing tracking technology that your marketing automation system already does. Like, if you can track all of your leads and see that they're visiting a page of your website, why can't you track your partners and your partner's leads using the same existing technology? This is already there. It's been proven out. It works really well when you have really smart, skilled marketers using that technology. That can permeate through your partner software and through your partner relationships and actually give you all of those great data points that you use in direct sales, you can use it in your partnerships and your indirect sales as well.

And so I get super geeked by working with teams to tie some of this stuff together and find these really elegant, simple solutions that accomplish what you need with what you already have. It doesn't mean you have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn't mean you have to invest in new R and D. It doesn't mean to buy more software. Sometimes there's just really, really simple answers, and you feel really good about it when you stumble upon those working with your customers.

Jen: It's such a good message about simplicity, and technology's so funny because most of us have these pretty powerful tools at our disposal, and yet, because they are powerful and they're complex in their nature, we can very easily overcomplicate them.

And, I'm just kind of laughing in my head because one of my team members was working on a project, and it was taking her like a lot longer than I anticipated it was going to take her. But then when I checked in with her on it, I looked at what she had been doing and she had overcomplicated it for herself like times five, there was a much simpler path from A to B than she had taken, because the technology was so great, because the technology was awesome. But she missed it, and I saw how very, very easy it is for even sophisticated sales and marketing and channel professionals to follow down that path and start overcomplicating a system that's already kind of there and alive and working for them.

Kyle: Yeah, we talked a lot about giving people too much rope. I think that's probably an analogy you use when raising kids. You're like, "Give them too much freedom and what's gonna happen?" So it's kind of the same thing, that just because you can add more features and just because you can do more stuff doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

I think the flip side is a really interesting scenario is watching what Apple's doing. And I'm not a fanboy, so when I say this, this is with a ton of objective respect. I love that they're hitting delete on things. I love that they're removing items, that they're removing stuff. That simplicity is hard. I mean, can you imagine that have to happen within that organization to convince everybody that it's a good idea to keep deleting ports on the machine and keep throwing stuff away? And yet, they keep selling, they're selling strong, new things keep going, innovation keeps happening and people keep going with it, and come to find out, you didn't necessarily need it after all. You could get away with less. That's hard. I mean, they're in a fortunate place to be a market leader and be able to drive that, and that's hard for a lot of people kind of in their daily lives to be able to sell that, I think because aren't we kinda bred to be with the idea that more is better?

Jen: Right.

Kyle: Everything about us is about "consumption of more," you know? And I'm not trying to get down that little societal rabbit hole, but we think that way. We think, "Oh, well, like, let me go look at a chart and line up this software and look at features. Well, they have more check boxes on the left, so it must be better." But really? I mean, can you make use of all of that?

I think that's one of the challenges that the channel faces is the idea that they've been told for so long that they need more. You can't even make use of more. You can't make use of most of those things that are fullest. It's the same reason why Apple can delete all these extra ports, because most people weren't using them or didn't need them anyways. And it kinda goes the same with feature sets on software, feature sets on need. I've got this little joke around here that my ideal keyboard would have half of your keyboard with a big delete button and then there's just a couple of letters on the other side. I don't even need uppercase letters. I don't even want the shift key. It's known around here. It's like, if someone says, "I deleted something." I just like cheer and hand them some stock. "Here you go."

Jen: Oh, I think we'll have a Kyle keyboard in your future. I can see it.

Kyle: Yeah, and I'm not some minimalist. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some minimalist, right? You know me, Jen. I've got too many cars and projects and objectives and things I'm trying to do in life. I keep on top of working. I have no business doing all of that. So I'm definitely guilty as the rest of them of acquisition of things and the features and ideas. I throw out ideas, I use our prospect pages in Allbound and I'm like, "Dang it, I really need this other feature," and I go into our Slack group to talk about it and the thing jumps on me right away, it's a bit quiet.

So, I'm as guilty as the rest of them. It's most definitely a decided practice that you engage in over time to question what do you really need to really focus and really accomplish what you want? And the focus to grow applies from top-down, and it applies to every aspect of business, and less is a really, really beautiful thing.

And so it totally geeks me when I get to work with clients and we get to focus in on some of that, of removing extra needs and removing things that may have seemed like a good idea but actually, in the end, wind up just being something else to own, extra baggage, extra weight, extra responsibility that doesn't really generate value.

Jen: I was about to say, "I have one more question for you," and I'm looking at my question that I wrote down for myself and there's multiple question marks in that question, so I guess it's more than one question. But one more area I want to cover, it's specifically about SaaS companies, because there are a lot of SaaS comp