Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

Why the C-Suite Must Rethink Everything—From Sales to Strategy—in an AI-Driven World How to challenge conventional thinking and how executives must adapt to the current marketplace. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ This dynamic panel discussion dives deep into the tectonic shifts impacting the tech industry, particularly the role of AI and the evolution of partnerships. Industry experts Jay McBain, Janet Schijns, and Greg Sarafin challenge conventional thinking, emphasizing the urgent need for companies to elevate partnering to the C-suite and adapt to the rapid advancements in AI. The conversation explores how AI is poised to disrupt SaaS, reshape revenue models, and even alter the very nature of work. The panelists debate the balance between direct sales and channel strategies, the impact of marketplaces, and the importance of integrating partnering throughout an organization’s operating model. The discussion also addresses the potential for AI to both streamline operations and create friction, with panelists highlighting the importance of data integration and the development of agentic technologies. The panel grapples with the promise of AI-driven efficiency gains versus the need to preserve human-centered experiences, particularly in local communities. Ultimately, the conversation underscores the transformative power of AI, the evolving dynamics of partnerships, and the critical need for businesses to embrace change to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape. https://youtu.be/OkN7nfSLuKY?si=A8q9mu-niYhFZLwL Key Takeaways AI is Disrupting SaaS: The panelists believe AI is rapidly changing the SaaS landscape, potentially rendering traditional SaaS models obsolete within a few years if they don’t adapt to autonomous SaaS. Partnerships Need Elevation: There’s a concern that partnerships are not being prioritized at the board and C-suite level, which could negatively impact companies’ success. AI Will Change Work: AI is expected to significantly impact the workforce, with agents potentially replacing task-oriented roles and digital twins augmenting human capabilities. Revenue Models Are Evolving: AI is driving a shift away from traditional subscription models, with new pricing structures emerging. Marketplaces Are Important: Marketplaces are playing a growing role in shaping buying behavior and influencing which tech stacks and ecosystems are successful. Direct Sales vs. Channel: The panel discusses the evolving balance between direct sales and channel strategies in an AI-driven world, with a potential shift in the calculus of cost of sales. Data Integration is Key: Effective use of AI in partnerships requires robust data integration across different systems and platforms. Human Element Matters: Despite the rise of AI, there’s an expectation that human-centered experiences and local businesses will remain important, particularly in the SMB sector. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in now for an inspiring conversation that could redefine your business strategy! Register – Only Two Weeks Left !!! Register Today! Keywords & Transcript Keywords: AI, artificial intelligence, partnerships, channel, SaaS, software as a service, technology, business, digital transformation, agentic AI, marketplaces, hyperscalers, cloud computing, sales, marketing, C-suite, leadership, innovation, tech trends, future of work, automation, digital twins, revenue, go-to-market, partner programs, tech industry, enterprise, enterprise tech, channel strategy, co-selling, integrations, tech industry, generative AI, cloud computing, digital marketing, B2B, technology, business, software, IT solutions, partner enablement, partner management, tech partnerships, AI trends, autonomous SaaS, agent layer, data integration, revenue production, cost of sales, sales enablement, partner development, channel account managers, partner account managers, digital twin, co-pilot, autonomous CRM, partner ecosystem, OEM partnering, strategic partners, small p partnering, Big P partnering. Transcription: Winter Retreat Panel Audio Episode [00:00:00] Greg Sarafin: I tell you how many people, they think more partners equals more revenue. That is completely the opposite of the truth. Fewer strategic partners equals more revenue. Everybody else should be on your platform. If you’re a platform company orchestrated in your platform ecosystem, when it comes truly to partnering, it should be a very short list. [00:00:19] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other. We believe we refer to these as the tectonic shifts, [00:00:25] Jay McBain: all the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together, managed services will be one and a half times larger [00:00:31] Intro: because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized, and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized. [00:00:44] Intro: Can you figure out first what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership. [00:00:56] Vince Menzione: Welcome to, or welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzis and my mission is to help leaders like you. [00:01:04] Vince Menzione: Achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. On February 20th, 2025, a small group of industry leaders converged here in Boca Raton, Florida, in this very studio for Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat. What followed was an incredible discourse on the tectonic shifts and the rapid change we’re all seeing as partners. [00:01:26] Vince Menzione: I’m joined on stage for a panel discussion. With Jay McBain, principal analyst at Canals, Janet Schein, the CEO of JSG Group, and Greg Raffin, vice Chairman Emeritus at ey. If you weren’t able to join us in person or on the live stream, we’re bringing this incredible session to you here. This is my gift to you. [00:01:50] Vince Menzione: All I ask in return is that you tell your friends, subscribe. Consider joining the Ultimate Partner community and hopefully joining us in the future at an Ultimate Partner event. I hope these sessions provide you the learnings you need to continue to achieve your greatest results. And now here to this amazing session, I would say Eco somewhat. [00:02:12] Vince Menzione: I just want frame the conversation here. Janet sits on a couple of boards. I’ve asked her to join the conversation ’cause we wanna learn not only what partners need to think and do differently. But what do organizations all up need to think and do differently? Greg has led the largest, I would say, one of the largest ecosystems in the industry at ey, taking it from under a billion dollars to 11, 12, maybe even more billion dollars a year in annualized revenue with a really true partnership strategy. [00:02:41] Vince Menzione: So we wanna get their perspective here in the conversation. Uh, I’m going to start with a little bit of a softball. I want to, I want to go back to these tectonic shifts. Jay, Jay just shared a whole bunch of new information with us. Anything that was most striking from that conversation with Jay? Just now? [00:02:57] Janet Schijns: I think that, [00:02:59] Vince Menzione: just let it, yeah, let it, let’s see. Yep. You’re on. Everybody awake now? Okay, good. [00:03:05] Janet Schijns: Uh, I think that the big thing that struck me in the conversation is how few senior leaders are elevating partnership to the board and the senior level. Yeah, I, I see instances of it. I’m on some of those boards, but then I see a lot of instances not of it, where the, where the channel or partner, um, community and leader is being shoved down in the organization rather than risen up. [00:03:29] Janet Schijns: And I think this is the biggest risk to that Fortune 500 list. You wanna know who’s gonna be off that Fortune 500, less than 20 years, the people who didn’t get to that, elevated to their C-suite. And truly, if you’re not a company whose CPO is in line to be your next CEO. You’re gonna be off that list. [00:03:51] Greg Sarafin: I, I’m actually gonna hit on the AI point since my 88-year-old father asked me about ai. Every time I talk to him, see your earlier question. I started laughing. I’m like, okay, I gotta talk to Pops this weekend. Um, here’s what I’ll say about ai. It is, I, I do not believe we’re over indexing on ai. In fact, I believe many SaaS companies are under indexing on it. [00:04:12] Greg Sarafin: I believe SaaS as a species will cease to exist in five years. Unless it makes the pivot to autonomous SaaS, right? So building the agent layer. If you talk to Christian Klein about his strategy at SAP, you saw the BDC announcement last week with the partnership with Databricks. It is fundamental to SAP and every SaaS vendor on the planet large and small, that they get you to build the autonomous layer in their platform. [00:04:37] Greg Sarafin: Otherwise, you’re gonna build it in Microsoft or Hyperscaler or on video. And then they’re going to become a database in the future because the value capture will be in the agent layer, not in the legacy system of record SaaS platform. So that to me is if I’m a SaaS company, that is the thing I’m thinking about. [00:04:57] Greg Sarafin: What is the autonomous version of me? And then ultimately, what is the services on software version of me, which is the ultimate realization of like what I call the convergence between the SAS market and the professional services market. I could wax poetically about what’s happening in professional services. [00:05:11] Greg Sarafin: Yeah. But I’ll spare you all that one. [00:05:13] Vince Menzione: Well, we’ll go there. We’ll go there. Okay. But, but I wanna clarify in that, ’cause I, I do think that’s an interesting point because today we act, we, we feed the data into the CRM or ERP system, right? Very manual process. And then we act on the data, or we ask, we ask the system to tell us what to do. [00:05:30] Vince Menzione: So how, so how does the agent ai, so the entire, [00:05:33] Greg Sarafin: so the entire SaaS industry exists. To allow really inefficient humans to do things reasonably efficiently and very large multi human business processes. And how does it do that? It creates these little tasks and turns all humans into task reps, right? When you, if you have the misfortune of most of your days spent on a so platform, you’ve had that experience. [00:05:54] Greg Sarafin: It’s horrible. Right? So here’s the problem for the humans in that equation. Yeah. Task rabbits can easily be replaced by agents. Yes. Yeah. That is the truth. And they don’t have to be particularly smart agents. They’re, they’re really an agent based on an R three at this point, or a, uh, you know, a Gemini two oh is probably sufficient. [00:06:15] Greg Sarafin: It’s equivalent of maybe a college grad. Uh, to be able to do those types of tasks, rather things. Where it’s really gonna get interesting is in three to five years as that adjunct layer gets smarter and smarter, and now all of a sudden the intelligence about the finance function, facts function, whatever it is. [00:06:31] Greg Sarafin: Ends up in that layer and the old legacy SaaS database and all of the, you know, configuration files and all the hard-coded workflows and everything else, that’s meaningless, right? All that really matters is there’s a place to persistent data so it can be audited and validated and so forth, right? So it’s going to change tremendously. [00:06:56] Greg Sarafin: It’s gonna start by replacing the humans that are acting as task rec. Rabbits and the SaaS platforms, and it will ultimately be the margin capture in AI will land in two places. It’ll land at the agent layer and it will also land at the base of the stack. It’ll land in what we call the hyperscalers today. [00:07:15] Greg Sarafin: Nvidia will join them, I think XAI will probably join them, maybe Oracle will. Mm-hmm. And you’re gonna have these platforms where, from the data center, floor silicone, all the way up to the top layers of the stat. It’s completely owned by these major players and you’re gonna run your workloads on those stacks. [00:07:32] Greg Sarafin: Right? So it’s a very dystopian world. Yeah. Uh, it’s gonna feel like we have five different purveyors of IBM mainframes. Uh, but that’s the world that we are betting on in terms of how we think about how our business is gonna evolve. [00:07:46] Vince Menzione: So sas, SAS will go away in five [00:07:47] Jay McBain: years. I’ll, I’ll say that, you know, that the fight that the public fight in the last couple of weeks between Mark Benioff and Satcha at Microsoft has been about. [00:07:55] Jay McBain: Yeah. You know, software kind of ate the world. And then AI eats software. It’s not that eats the software, it’s eating the model. The idea when you don’t have as many tasks people out there is you don’t have to buy as many subscriptions. And when Salesforce starts charging you $2 per outcome or per conversation in Agent force, that’s a different model. [00:08:16] Jay McBain: But if you’re already spending $150 for the subscription and then you start looking at your bill and you’re getting the $2 hit. At, at some point, you know, wall Street, you’d love to say Wall Street, we’re gonna charge people $300 per person. Yeah. And it’s just not gonna happen. The subscription prices are gonna start to come down to the people that could actually go in and create reports and do analytics, do intelligence, but that’s, you know, 10% of people that might ever need to go in and log in. [00:08:41] Jay McBain: That’s the head of, of the model, the ui, ux on top. What, uh, Greg is, is talking about, and it’s absolutely true, is that 90% of people are not gonna need that head. Because your copilot or your agent force or whatever agentic AI piece is not gonna come log in and pretend to be you. It’s going in the back door. [00:09:00] Jay McBain: There’s the data, but it’s not gonna know what to do with the data. I mean, with 250,000 pieces of SaaS out there, there’s no way that these big models are gonna understand how the data is structured and how, how they could use it. Yeah. So the workflows that you build on top of the data layer, you know, if you own a channel software text, you know. [00:09:20] Jay McBain: Stack company, you’re gonna, well this data and this data and this data we connected and this is the value. And boy is that valuable to the sales person, the marketing person, the CX person, the product person. And that’s the co-pilot’s gonna talk to a co-pilot and behind the scenes be able to bring that value at the right time. [00:09:37] Greg Sarafin: They all really blow your minds. Imagine a world where you as a manager have 10,000 agents on your workforce, and then you have a digital twin of you. You can call it a copilot if you want, but it’s really your digital twin that is the interface between you and those 10,000 agents because you as a human being, cannot manage 10,000 agents, but your digital twin can. [00:09:58] Greg Sarafin: Your digital twin can then talk to you at human speed, which is a fraction of the speed of talking to those agents where you need to make a decision or you need to be aware of something. Right. So this is a business architecture that’s quite, uh, interesting. Uh, and, uh. We can talk about this at the bar tonight perhaps. [00:10:16] Greg Sarafin: ’cause I don’t think you want to take the conversation this direction. I you’re, anyway, I probably don’t wanna go there. I would just add [00:10:20] Janet Schijns: one thing. Yeah, go ahead. I think if you talk about where your C-suite and your board is having the conversations, they were promised something by the industry. They were promised by Microsoft and other 30% reduction in staff. [00:10:33] Janet Schijns: That’s what they were promised as the outcome of ai. So as we talk about agents and we talk about digital twins and we talk about everything else, there is a check. That was written for technology that the C-suite and the board are not yet seeing a payout for towards that. Hey, we get there, we buy all this meta stuff, and then nothing happens. [00:10:53] Janet Schijns: Buy all this AI stuff, right? What’s gonna happen next? This is where the people come in. The people are resisting the change at certain levels, particularly in the partner ecosystem. As an example, if you have 375,000 partners, why isn’t the first place you look for a digital twin? Your channel leader? Yeah. [00:11:11] Janet Schijns: Your channel leader can’t possibly scale, right? But that’s not the conversation they’re having. They’re having conversations about, hey, especially we could cut 30% of accounting. So that’s again, where you need to change that conversation at the C level in the company to make sure that you’re doing the right thing. [00:11:27] Janet Schijns: It’s gonna magnify growth rather than just cost savings with ai. And I think that’s where the break is right now. [00:11:33] Vince Menzione: So how do we solve for the break? Yeah, [00:11:35] Janet Schijns: well, I would, I was in the channel. I would put together a group of people, you know, think of class action lawsuits, but we’re not gonna sue. Um, I would put together a group of partners and get them a way to communicate to your board and your C-suite. [00:11:47] Janet Schijns: Their voices are being masked, their voices are being shut down. They’re being treated like transactional partners and they’re not. And, and so all of the C-suite and the board is relying on a group of people that don’t know anything about partnering as they make these large decisions. And so they’re bringing in experts that sell the technology, but those experts that sell the technology are telling them things that won’t even work for the actual go to market model we have in our own environment. [00:12:17] Janet Schijns: And so if you’re a channel leader listening, if you’re a partner listening, start reaching out to the board. Start making your decisions about who you partner with by who they have on their board. I look at the boards of some of these companies. They have no one that even understands sales or marketing, much less the channel. [00:12:33] Janet Schijns: They’re hiring channel leaders, partners, CPOs, that have no partnering experience because they went to college with them and they’re friends with them. You need to have the discussion. You need to take a Michelle McBain, and I’m looking at her right here in the front row, who’s an amazing channel person and, and have her voice heard. [00:12:51] Janet Schijns: Have my voice heard, have Jay’s voice heard. Right. Have all of Vince’s voice heard. Get the voices heard by the C-suite and the, and the, and the entire board, or honestly, I think they’re gonna go in the wrong direction. Yeah. Uh, and, and it’s gonna be very damaging. And, and again, I’ll repeat myself from earlier, those are gonna be the companies that fall off the Fortune 5,000, much less the 500. [00:13:11] Vince Menzione: I I do think there’s a skills gap and I’ll, a massive skills gap. And I’ll, I’ll look at the end there. Greg is a, is an example of somebody who brought financial chops into the board, right? Mm-hmm. And I think that one of the challenges we talked, we’ve all talked about this conversation. That the, the path to chief partner officer today looks like somebody who was a channel leader, who became a channel chief, who just took on the title chief partner officer, maybe has some cred in at the C-suite and maybe doesn’t. [00:13:39] Janet Schijns: Right. Right. [00:13:39] Vince Menzione: And that I think is, I think that’s one of the biggest challenges, is that nice [00:13:42] Janet Schijns: titling change and will make you believe that you’re important. And even though we do 80% of our sales through you, you’re not really important. And that’s the conversation you need to push that conversation. If you’re a partner listening to this, you need to push that with your top vendors, suppliers, ISVs, and if you’re a ISV vendor supplier, you gotta push that with your C-suite, push that with your board. [00:14:02] Janet Schijns: You are not listening. You’re, you’re not, and you’re running past your partnering and it’s gonna, it’s gonna really damage these firms that don’t really adapt because AI is, is great, but only if you apply it to the right place, which is your predominant go to market, your channel. [00:14:16] Vince Menzione: I know Jay and I had this conversation, maybe it’s two years ago now, right? [00:14:19] Vince Menzione: About the the new skill. Do you think we’ve, we’re seeing the new skill set apply generally? Because I don’t, I don’t know if I agree we have [00:14:28] Jay McBain: No, I agree with Janet and I spent a lot of time again Yeah. Boards. Yeah. And you know, looking and they’re very impressive people, you know, getting called into these big reseller boards, you know, there’s the head of United Healthcare, there’s the head of Boeing. [00:14:40] Jay McBain: I mean, these are people with ridiculous resumes. And really rich and famous and, and everything else. And I’m looking around the room going, you know that, that’s different. I go back to Janet’s originally original concept. And this isn’t just the technology industry. These are all 27 industries grappling with this. [00:14:58] Jay McBain: Yeah. Uh, one of the things that jumped out to me like two years ago when Apple was doing an iPhone launch, like later in the broadcast, you know, Tim Cook kind of stood up and said, do you know that 79% of people today will not buy a car unless it has Apple CarPlay? I’m sure he meant to say Android Auto as well. [00:15:15] Jay McBain: But imagine, you know, just switch gears and you’re in this $3 trillion auto industry, you know, 63 brands, 365 cars. Yeah. But it’s 120 year old industry. You’re just taking over a dealership from your great great grandparents or passing it down and because of a tech integration you’re missing, you’re about to lose four fifths of your buyers. [00:15:36] Jay McBain: So this isn’t just SaaS companies, right? This isn’t just marketplace. This isn’t the rich getting richer. This is every industry to Greg’s point has to lose kind of this ui ux on top. And I want my copilots talking to my pharmaceutical company, my pharmacy. I want them talking to my, um, all the industries I work in, um, or live in every day. [00:15:59] Jay McBain: And that’s part of every board. Yeah. Great. And I’ll say that there’s a 90% miss. Yeah. In terms of people that will be able to enunciate that and bring it up as a topic of. Critical importance, tectonic shift, inflection point is the best and quickest way, you know, into a board absolute or into a C-suite. [00:16:17] Jay McBain: And right now is absolutely the time. Yeah. [00:16:20] Jay McBain: Yeah. And I would [00:16:20] Janet Schijns: say, I know board seats are at a, you know, there’s not a lot of board seats available. A board advisor, you know, it just get to the point you saw J slide had 117 consultants in it. There you go. 117 people plus the top channel chiefs. That could be an advisor to your boards. [00:16:34] Janet Schijns: Absolutely. And I think the skill gap is just widening and it’s, it’s concerning. [00:16:39] Vince Menzione: And why isn’t it happening? [00:16:40] Greg Sarafin: I think it’s because we continue to conflate small P partnering with Big P partnering. Yeah. Mm-hmm. [00:16:47] Greg Sarafin: So small p partnering is partnering equals go to market equals channel one equals effectively indirect selling, right? [00:16:54] Greg Sarafin: Um, we forget that not every company is a platform company, but if you’re a platform company, you will not be a success. And by the way, platform not just top out, you know, my favorite platform company is Rebi. Go to Home Depot. Bloody thing is a huge platform. It’s a battery platform with an amazing assortment of tools. [00:17:09] Greg Sarafin: And I’m a tool geek, right? They’re auto, Tesla is a platform. Yeah. Right. So you know, generally in this world, you’ve got platform business models and vertically integrated business models. There’s probably an oversimplification, but if you’re running a platform business. Partnering is not just about channel, it’s also about co-innovation. [00:17:27] Greg Sarafin: It’s about co-investment and it’s about extending your platform through an ecosystem of partners and then being an outstanding orchestrator of that ecosystem, right? Which to me is really the center of gravity for partnering. ’cause that also then connects you back to the other side of partnering, which everybody forgets about, which is OEM partnering. [00:17:49] Greg Sarafin: Right. I drive my car, I’ve got my Apple car play, but I’ve got my RO seats. I’ve got my Brembo brakes. Right. This is not a new concept, folks, right? Right. But we’ve somehow, we’ve made partnering small p and I’ve been in many organizations where they have multiple partnering functions, not talking to each other, not realizing they all should be connected to maximize the flow of value through that value chain, and also reducing the number of partners they have. [00:18:13] Greg Sarafin: Because I gotta tell you how many people, they think more partners equals more revenue. That is completely the opposite of the truth. Fewer strategic partners equals more revenue. Everybody else should be on your platform. If you’re a platform company orchestrated in your platform ecosystem, when it comes truly to partnering, it should be a very short list. [00:18:31] Greg Sarafin: So to me, that’s the issue we have and we’re not explaining that to boards. Yeah. And we also frankly don’t have like a CPO if I said, okay, what is the role of A CPO and what is the career path to CPO? And I asked 10 smart people, I would get 10 completely different answers guaranteed. Maybe 11. ’cause one would change their mind extremely. [00:18:50] Greg Sarafin: Right? I pick that one. If I asked 10 PE those same people, what’s the role of A CFO? I get very similar answers, both in terms of the role and the career path, [00:18:58] Janet Schijns: and you know what that says to me. We don’t really have cpo. We don’t have CPOs. Right. The CPO isn’t actually a member. That’s right. The C-suite. [00:19:04] Janet Schijns: It’s a glory title we gave because we thought it might raise our throughput production in the little P by 10 or 15% to have a CPO. Ooh, maybe they can sell a little bit more next year. And I have to tell you, if you’re working with or working for a company, that that’s how they’re talking about the channel. [00:19:18] Janet Schijns: I like that little PI usually call it transactionally. Um, if that’s how they’re talking about the channel, you should run because your career is at risk. If the channel is about just distribution your, your career is at risk. That company’s going nowhere. It really should be integrated into the fabric of your company. [00:19:36] Janet Schijns: Where I would say back in the day, there was a quote from the head of Kellogg and he said, you could take everything we have and leave me the brand and I will survive. And I would say, now you can take everything I have and leave me the real partners and I will survive. And that’s the mindset that they need to get at the top of these companies. [00:19:54] Janet Schijns: Yeah. [00:19:54] Greg Sarafin: Which they don’t. Speaking of channel. Go ahead. Just one last point on channel. And channel is kind of like super sweet sugar cereal. Mm-hmm. Right? It tastes really good and it has no nutrition. In fact, it’s making you sick. Mm-hmm. Okay. For the most part. Mm-hmm. Uh, everybody needs a little cereal now and then, don’t get me wrong, [00:20:15] Janet Schijns: yes. [00:20:15] Janet Schijns: Sunday morning. There are two. [00:20:16] Greg Sarafin: There are two issues with over indexing on channel in your enterprise. The first is, um. You lose fidelity on your revenue forecast and if you’re a public company in particular, but even if you have, you know, LPs and gps that really care about your business performance on a quarterly basis, not being able to forecast your revenue because too much of your revenue is un forecastable is a really bad idea. [00:20:38] Greg Sarafin: Second thing is, particularly if you’re in an industry like tech, where it’s actually not the first sale that matters, it’s the renewal that matters. Selling through the channel typically has a much lower renewal rate than selling direct with customer success. Right. So your, your channel feels good because you’re moving some of your cost of sales. [00:20:57] Greg Sarafin: You’re making it invisible as cost of revenue, as effectively a discount. It’s only two or three points of discount, but then you add a bunch of cost of sales on top of it because now you’ve got a whole team that’s trying to define with those wooden sticks what the actual revenue forecast is gonna be from each of your channel partners. [00:21:14] Greg Sarafin: Right? And we’re heading to a world where the productivity of direct sellers is about the 10 x. Right, because autonomous CRM, what is it going to do is gonna eliminate all of that layer of sales enablement. People that suck at their jobs and can’t enable pretty much anybody, and are a huge drag on expense ratio, expensive cost to sales or sg and a to revenue. [00:21:37] Greg Sarafin: And it is going to now create sellers that actually you can expect to have 10 times the quota that they had yesterday, right? In three years, let’s say. So you actually need to be thinking about. Channel as don’t eat too many of those cocoa puffs, particularly given that you’re about to see a step change in the productivity of your direct sellers in terms of their ability to address the market for you. [00:21:59] Greg Sarafin: Then I’ll stop. I’ll just, uh, I’m gonna jump in on [00:22:02] Greg Sarafin: that. I thought that might get right. I thought that might get right. It’s [00:22:05] Jay McBain: provocative, so I’m gonna disagree with the. [00:22:15] Jay McBain: To determine how their customers buy your category or your industry dictates to you. Uh, I mentioned cybersecurity. If you went with your advice and ignored the 91.6% of customers who bought through channels, you’d be competing in 8% of your tam. If you sell PCs, 70% are bought through Larry and the white van. [00:22:36] Jay McBain: If you decide that Larry and the white van’s not good for you, you’re competing with Dell for the 30% direct. Market by market. There’s 2200 categories on G two crowd of categories that are all predetermined by your buyer and procurement and how it works. Yeah. So your channels, you wanna participate in a hundred percent of your TAM if, if you can. [00:22:57] Jay McBain: And you wanna participate in all the ways that money changes hands, whether it be indirect, marketplace or direct. And that’s one muscle. That’s small. P partnering. That’s the part I agree with. The bigger P partnering is, I’d love to partner with the other six people That’s right, who are doing the co-selling co-marketing, who are doing the consulting design, who are doing implementation integrations. [00:23:18] Jay McBain: That’s right. Who are lowering our cost to acquire the customer who are building bigger deals and closing them faster, and who get us a customer for life. If I can take those six and equate them back to my revenue targets, which is what boards and CEOs and CFOs care about, and do that in a repeatable, reliable way. [00:23:36] Jay McBain: That is the big P partnering. And by the way, every company has to do both. [00:23:42] Janet Schijns: Yeah. So, hey, I’m gonna, so I don’t know if you guys think I should sit between them or like. [00:23:51] Janet Schijns: I’m gonna, so here you go. I’m gonna do the thing. I’m gonna reconcile the two views, right? I think they’re both, I think they’re both right. Yes. [00:23:58] Janet Schijns: So on on the one level, we are seeing a seed change in reliability and how partners, because many of the partners are not commercializing the offer, it’s very hard to figure out, particularly in the enterprise and large multinational space. [00:24:12] Janet Schijns: When the deal’s coming in, if you’re not working it. That’s why folks like I’m looking right here at Partner Tap at Cassandra, that’s why they’re having so much sex success because that integrated selling model is how people are really understanding how they’re gonna get the master kind of massive opportunity from enterprise by doing it with direct and indirect as the old school thing would say. [00:24:31] Janet Schijns: But then to Jay’s point, um, if you don’t do that, if you don’t partner with partners, um, you start to have conversations that sound a lot like funnel reviews. At the C-suite, which means, again, run from the company ’cause they don’t understand partnering. Because partnering is about integrating it through the fabric of your product development, of your enablement, of your sales, right, of your innovation, of your compliance, of your governance throughout the organization. [00:24:58] Janet Schijns: It because it’s 90% in security, it ought to be a core element of your operating model. And if you have flow charts in your company, I always challenge people with this and those flow charts don’t show where the partner tap partner spot is in every single area. Then you are not in partnering, you are in [00:25:15] Vince Menzione: channel [00:25:16] Janet Schijns: to my friend’s point here, channels. [00:25:18] Janet Schijns: So you’re [00:25:18] Vince Menzione: eating Cocoa Puffs, you’re eating Cocoa [00:25:20] Janet Schijns: Puffs, and you’re gonna be disappointed every quarter because unless you have a, a small business kind of package that you know, you get your volume and that kind of even got your, your forecast, you’re being disappointed every quarter. You’re never gonna able to what’s coming in. [00:25:34] Janet Schijns: And they’re friends and they’re gonna hug later. [00:25:38] Jay McBain: I remember sugary cereals were always part of a nutritious breakfast, but you had to have the orange apple and the juice. Lucky Char with all the other stuff that made it part of a nutrition breakfast. Correct? Correct. [00:25:48] Janet Schijns: You had, you had the juice. Yeah. [00:25:51] Vince Menzione: Well, I also think that ignoring the business model in this conversation where Greg is. [00:25:57] Vince Menzione: At the very top of the pyramid. Right. Large enter mostly large enterprise, maybe some mid-market. And I’m, I’m not ignoring the other fourth ’cause you’re right on the channel versus partnering piece. Absolutely. But also as you get higher up in the stack and you have the luxury, I would say, of resources attached to each of those customers that are driving the, the executive level conversations. [00:26:20] Vince Menzione: It’s different than a channel that may or may just come in and accelerate or juice your revenue for a period of time. Right, right, right. Yeah. And I [00:26:27] Greg Sarafin: do tend to buy as big, right in my thinking, right? ’cause I’ve been a big company for a long time and my statements are not meant to address every market segment. [00:26:35] Greg Sarafin: And I do agree with Jay actually, that there are certain companies in certain market segments for, in today’s market, must address the market through channel. They have no choice. I’m also suggesting that the way the world works today and the way the world’s gonna work in five years may be very different. [00:26:50] Greg Sarafin: And so I’m front running that a little bit and there’s no way to know if I’m right or wrong. I’m just telling you the bet we’re making. Yeah. Yep. [00:26:57] Vince Menzione: Let’s, that makes sense. That makes sense. Let’s dive in on that. ’cause I do, you know, you, you, you touched on a AI and AG agentic, and I’d love to see how we talk about this. [00:27:07] Vince Menzione: Like for the hyperscalers in the room. How are we thinking about partner development managers? How are we thinking about partnering in general? We have so many, we’re still using Excel spreadsheets for crying out loud, and we’re doing funnel reviews and we’re having conversations with account executives that are going nowhere because they’re overwhelmed with what they have to go drive with partners, with a group of partners. [00:27:29] Vince Menzione: Again, for every one of their customers, they have to rely, they have to talk to at least seven seats. They have to have all these conversations. They can’t really navigate it. How does AI help us improve that? Like how do we, how do we get better at that through ai? [00:27:43] Greg Sarafin: Uh, I’ll tell you, uh, the perspective that we, we have right now, uh, we believe that we and a lot of our large clients, but I would extend that to any, any customer honestly need to get serious about taking the people cost out of revenue production. [00:27:59] Greg Sarafin: Yeah. Uh, revenue production either needs to be through marketplaces and other automated mechanisms of. Commerce, uh, or it needs to be highly productive sellers, either in your direct sales force or in some channel partners direct sales force. Right? Uh, the cost of sales enablement at most companies, including mine, is outrageously high when you then index it to the benefit you’re getting. [00:28:25] Greg Sarafin: Mm-hmm. Right? I can tell you that I run a, an awesome team of partner development and partner operations people, most of whom I’ve moved offshore. Over the years and then put ServiceNow and other technologies underneath of them to automate all their, I’ve made them TaskRabbits, I suppose. Yeah, to my earlier point, uh, because there was no off the shelf software, we had to build all our own, uh, to satisfy the needs of our business. [00:28:51] Greg Sarafin: That has been reasonably successful. But at any given time, I can only address the needs of maybe 3% of my total sales force across the 160 countries that we operate in. And it is not sufficient. It is too expensive for the benefit we’re getting, and it’s not scalable. I need something I can scale at zero marginal cost to cover 100% of every selling opportunity to any given time, whether it is a partnering selling opportunity and or a selling opportunity where I need to have a deep understanding of a solution that we’ve developed, maybe with a partner, maybe not, right? [00:29:28] Greg Sarafin: So to me, the answer is. All of sg and a that is not direct revenue. Production needs to move to agent capabilities. Mm-hmm. To enable all of sellers and our average bag color should, should have ultimately have 10 x the quota they have today if we do it right, that is our, that is our view and that is our bet on the future of. [00:29:54] Greg Sarafin: Selling it, you [00:29:55] Janet Schijns: know, at least in our shop. Yeah. And we’re seeing the same thing in partners, right? Yeah. The larger partners across the, whether an SI and MSP of, of Iron work or var, right? Um, they’re starting to look at AI and where it can eliminate friction in the system, um, more than where it can eliminate headcount. [00:30:10] Janet Schijns: So instead I wanna repurpose that headcount to build the next great product to sell the next great product to go 10 x um, you know, our revenue, the issue is. That everybody’s doing their little piece products. It’s kind of like when we started putting things in the cloud. Everybody, every single department in a company bought an extra large cloud. [00:30:28] Janet Schijns: Um, they didn’t really need it, but they bought it and they all swiped credit cards and usage rates were going crazy and right. And all of a sudden, at one point in time, the CFO was like, what is happening? Why are our IT expenses so high? Um, and then they consolidated back into centralized it again, right? [00:30:44] Janet Schijns: We’re gonna, we’re gonna manage all the cloud. We’re seeing the same thing starting to happen now with the AI journey across, um, in the partner community, particularly where a lot of pet projects have happened. Um, and they’re not really what’s important. And I’m gonna use a specific example that’s on that chart. [00:30:59] Janet Schijns: You shared the telecom industry. I was the, you know, chief channel officer at Verizon. Um, there’s a massive expense. To run pipe if you actually want an enterprise to have all this great stuff we’re talking about ai, cloud service, the whole nine yards to actually work, it actually has to connect. Um, and so that has been really left behind to a certain extent because the cost is so high, it could cost you $5 million to put a vertical riser in a corporate building. [00:31:26] Janet Schijns: Right. And so what’s happened, innovators have come around like broadband, GPT, who have said, you know what? We can do all the build function up until the person puts the pick in the ground, right? To dig the permits, the sizing, the everything with with ai, and that’s going to not eliminate hundreds of installers and hundreds of engineers. [00:31:49] Janet Schijns: It’s going to mean that rather than waiting nine and a half months on average for an enterprise network. You are going to get an enterprise network in a month. Think about what this does for your level of innovation. So it’s not just a snazzy, pretty hyperscalers and ISVs that are gonna use ai. It’s the the toasters, right? [00:32:08] Janet Schijns: The, the plumbing and it’s gonna get faster and faster. And that pace of speed is what we’re all gonna be measured on. Are we as fast as ai? [00:32:16] Jay McBain: Let me, let me do a real life channel example, uh, in agentic ai. So in the 28 measurable moments. That a customer moves through from, I have a problem to making the purchase and, and how to measure those. [00:32:29] Jay McBain: In today’s world, uh, we live as the products on the internet. So the world of buying buyer intent data, those early moments. And what did they search for? 81% of customers start on Google or now, you know, chat, GBT. Um, where did they move from there? What did they find on Google? Well, they found an ebook, they found a podcast. [00:32:50] Jay McBain: So it’s those early moments. You know, both Google and Facebook have created $6 trillion of value on us being the products and the internet. When you speak in your kitchen, Alexa overhears you and Facebook serves you up an ad two minutes later. That’s 6 trillion of value on the stock market. Yeah. Yeah. [00:33:06] Jay McBain: So we kind of all went to elections last year, 45% of the world and 90% of the incumbents lost. [00:33:14] Jay McBain: And we kind of told our, our elective uh, representatives we’re done with that. So the end of the cookie. It’s creating the biggest change in those 28 moments ever. Another tectonic shift, right? So Google goes and Creeds version two of the cookies, goes to sell it to the European Union, which are the toughest people to sell to, and failed. [00:33:33] Jay McBain: A week later, they lost an antitrust suit in the us. So this was kind of the final, you know, moment. So when you start to look at those 28 moments, especially early, you start to say, well, how am I gonna get to them? Who owns the moment and how do I partner with them? So you use Partner Tap as a perfect example, which is perfect agent, right? [00:33:51] Jay McBain: Not only looking at the two CRM systems for SQLs, but looking at the marketing automation systems for uh, M qls. That’s right. But if I could go and have an agent say, you know, Hey, they, you know, found your ebook, they listened to your podcast, they come to my website and they actually came to my event. You know, just between the two of us, we found four of the first 10 moments. [00:34:11] Jay McBain: Yep. Boy, would it be a great time either digitally or physically. Ushering the customer through the next 18 moments to make sure that we both win. Yeah, absolutely. And in this new world, it’s not just partner Tap. Now I, I have to have an attribution tool. I have to have my, uh, to, uh, my, um, through channel marketing tool. [00:34:28] Jay McBain: I have to have my deal registration tool, my opportunity passing my LEAP app. So here’s like five or six things that I can’t go log into all six and go figure out for a particular deal. All the stuff that’s happening. But boy, could my copilot or my agent go and tap into all these places, put it like in cohorts [00:34:46] Janet Schijns: and Perfect. [00:34:46] Janet Schijns: Yeah. Yeah. [00:34:47] Jay McBain: Um, scenario of, oh my goodness, I’ve now seen 14 of the first 28 moments. I know exactly the customer who they are. I know exactly what they want, and I actually know the seven layers of the stack and the seven people that would be perfect for this. Let me orchestrate the 14 things going on, and let’s go win more deals, but I can’t do it without these layers. [00:35:09] Jay McBain: And I just, in the headless world, I gotta have this data and, uh, be able to execute, you know, within milliseconds. [00:35:17] Greg Sarafin: I’ll also, uh, use a real example. I’ll use us. Uh, we’re working right now with, uh, several of our largest partners and a third party, none of whom I’ll name, uh, at the innocent. But, uh, so here, here’s, here’s the thing we’re solving for, um, in order to replace partner development. [00:35:38] Greg Sarafin: And make it scalable. I wanna say it differently. To make partner development scalable, we need to be able to scale it with ai, not with people. It’s not scalable with people alone. Mm-hmm. [00:35:48] Greg Sarafin: Um, now I could build a bunch of AI on my side, but in order for that AI to really work, it also has to be able to then do work. [00:35:59] Greg Sarafin: And my partner’s systems of record as well. Well, guess what? My partners love me, but not that much. Mm-hmm. [00:36:05] Greg Sarafin: They’re not gonna let me go trade, send around in their patch. Right. And by the way, I have the same view of them. So what we’ve determined is we actually need to work with a trusted third party to sit between us to build the agents to our specifications. [00:36:18] Greg Sarafin: That’s right. And those agents can work both sides of the street, literally. So they understand all my business rules and all of my constraints and, and how to access my systems of record, including my CRM, uh, et cetera. And then they also understand the same thing about the other sites, and they also understand the translation later. [00:36:36] Greg Sarafin: And they also know how to enable my sellers and their sellers to work together, even though they’ve never, they’ve never, never done that before. Right? So that is really where we’re hyper-focused right now, is how you create that sort of. Agent force to use Benioff’s term that works both sides of the organization, but protecting my data from them and their data from me, right, in order to accomplish and then really take the cost out and make it infinitely scalable to do partner enablement. [00:37:05] Janet Schijns: I love that. And that sounds too heady. If you’re listening, uh, here and the audience are on, you’re like, that seems we’re talking headless. That seems like a lot. Okay. But it seems like a lot to do. Right? Um, the simple thing I’ve encouraged people to do is go out and look at the seven or eight. Big partners that you have in your stack, right? [00:37:23] Janet Schijns: You know, maybe your checkpoint for security. Who else is in your stack that a partner would sell? And I know the guys from Unifier are here. They’ve built a cool platform as has Partner Tap, to let you actually integrate with those other parties, the third parties, [00:37:39] Janet Schijns: right? And, and maybe you start there, right? [00:37:41] Janet Schijns: Maybe you start at the very practical, like, hey, if a partner just didn’t have to. From a go to market transactional standpoint, register a lead in nine platforms, maybe that would get us more business. Um, you know, and maybe it would because maybe you’re kind of a pain in the neck to deal with. Um, and so those kinds of platforms that are just saying, Hey, let’s make it one motion for our partners, rip out to Greg’s point, that sales enablement issue where you have to have 10 people just to interface with systems. [00:38:07] Janet Schijns: That’s where you’re gonna see it. And you know, we see this at AV point. Now look, I’m biased, I’m on the AV point board. DS is here and he’s the best marketer in the world. But AV Point stood up one day and said, we’re gonna put a channel expert on the board. We’re gonna go hard at helping the MSPs with their business. [00:38:24] Janet Schijns: It wasn’t about the revenue, but the revenue followed. Right? When the MSPs saw the dedication, the, the things that at Point was doing to simplify their. Life to simplify their business, to help their business make money. The business came with it because the bottom line is partners do vote with the quote, right? [00:38:44] Janet Schijns: They’re not gonna quote you unless you’re a good partner. Um, and while we can sit up here and say, Hey, it’s not gonna be about transactions, it still is half about transactions. And so I would say that the better partner you become, and AV point has demonstrated this, the more and more business you get, the more your partners grow, the more your partners become the top Microsoft partners, because that’s the ecosystem that AV point is in. [00:39:05] Janet Schijns: The more the partners start to use you more and more in their business, the better partners they become. The more big companies now wanna be your partners and integrate into your stack, right? It really comes down to saying, I’m gonna put the revenue over here, as uncomfortable as that sounds. I’m gonna put it over here and first I’m gonna be a good partner and then I’m gonna get the revenue. [00:39:24] Vince Menzione: So I love what you have to say about a point. And, and Ducks is gonna be on a session in a little while talking about marketplaces. In fact. So I, we haven’t really touched on marketplaces in this conversation. We have two of the three are here in the room talking about marketplaces today. So I think it’s a really great, like we have $419 billion in durable cloud budgets today, right? [00:39:48] Vince Menzione: Why, why isn’t it moving as fast as it? I believe it should. I don’t feel like it’s moving as fast as it should. Partners are selling [00:39:54] Janet Schijns: against it. That’s my final answer. Okay. [00:40:00] Jay McBain: It it’s that there’s a couple layers to the answer. Yeah. Uh, one is that 82% compounded growth is nothing to scoff at. Right. That’s almost doubling in size every year. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: Yeah. AWS became a top 10 distributor in less than two years. A distribution business has been around 40 years. Mm-hmm. Agree. It took them two. Agree, agree. And that was top 10. Now we’re starting to talk about them as a top five, right. Joining TD Cynics Ingram, who are 60 and $50 billion distributors bigger than Nike and Coca-Cola and Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. [00:40:33] Jay McBain: That’s the size we’re talking about. That’s pretty fast. And that’s doubling almost every year when you add the agentic models. It continues to grow even faster than that, [00:40:44] Vince Menzione: but how much of it is fulfillment on private offers versus net new revenue? That’s, that’s the question I have. The thing that [00:40:50] Jay McBain: doesn’t change that quickly, which, which you know, is procurement. [00:40:54] Jay McBain: Procurement and large enterprise, especially procurement. In the government, 56% of our industry is enterprise. Mm-hmm. 44% is SMB does turn faster. Right. But SMBs are not buying cloud consumption. No. So to go to the procurement divisions, uh, and the government is getting dozed pretty quickly. Yes. In terms of how they buy. [00:41:16] Jay McBain: In other words, they’re turning everything off. Now. It’s a verb. I like it. And getting everything turned on. So we saw yesterday that, you know, Gartner just got like $5 billion of business shut off by the federal government. Yeah. And nobody looked to see if there was creating value and why, and who and where. [00:41:31] Jay McBain: And all they said is, it’s all off now. It’s canceled, and now you’ve gotta go reapply for the money. Mm-hmm. [00:41:37] Jay McBain: And so it’s just a kind of a 50% cost savings. But procurement is in, you know, dog years. Yeah, yeah. And that’s why it’s happening. And procurement, what you feel is slower procure and procurement has the [00:41:47] Janet Schijns: relationship with who? [00:41:49] Janet Schijns: The partner. Right. We’ve seen this 70 plus percent of the time they’re buying through the partner. The services is leading the sale inertia. So now when you try to push that to the marketplace and cut the partner out, and I’m sorry, with all the love in my heart to the hyperscalers, you are trying to cut the partner out. [00:42:02] Janet Schijns: You can talk to me about your partner program and what you’re trying to do and how you’re helping, but it’s not true. 50%, right? Exactly. It’s not true. You’re not integrating the partner into your marketplace play. So you’re forcing the partner to do the only thing they can, which is sell against you. And then the next thing they’re gonna do is find an alternative and we can smile and say, we’re too big to fail, but the hyperscalers are not too big to fail. [00:42:24] Janet Schijns: We have seen big companies in our industry fail before. So the hyperscalers that get it right. That. Get the partner to understand how it works in their business and how they can use and place orders in the, in the marketplace. Use it as part of their thing, lower their costs, because they’re putting their customers through marketplaces. [00:42:43] Janet Schijns: That’s the hyperscaler that wins. [00:42:45] Vince Menzione: I think we’re gonna hear some of that later. [00:42:47] Greg Sarafin: I’ll just give a slightly different take on marketplace. Different perspective, I suppose. So I, I don’t know where marketplaces end, but I can tell you they have already had a massive impact that may not be as visible to many of these. [00:43:00] Greg Sarafin: Uh, so in our business, you know, we, we sort of go to market by industry and then by buyer, right? So the, the head of, you know, uh, insurance operations at, in the insurance industry. And so it used to be for years that we had a partner ecosystem curated around that buyer. With a bunch of different technology products that we had pre-integrated together, and that was sort of our easy button offering. [00:43:26] Greg Sarafin: Now, if you wanted to piece part it out, that’s fine. We would do that for you too, but we always would come with an easy button. What’s happened with the marketplace is it is so dramatically changed buying behaviors. We had to actually create three versions of that ecosystem. One for the Microsoft stack, one for the Amazon stack, and one for the Google Stack, because clients want the draw down. [00:43:47] Greg Sarafin: That they get through the marketplace. Mm-hmm. And so if you go to them with an ecosystem that has something that can only be drawn down in Amazon, and it’s a Microsoft, it’s a Mac, that that client has a massive Mac and they need to draw down there, that’s gonna be a losing value proposition. So those marketplaces from one perspective are extremely, uh, successful from my per ’cause. [00:44:05] Greg Sarafin: They are shaping the winners and losers around each of those stacks. And then that has a wash back effect on us because we now have to support three different versions that’s right, of ecosystems for each of the solutions that we bring to market. So that’s a different take. I’d share with you all. [00:44:21] Jay McBain: I’ll take, uh, just three reasons why looking forward of all the trends coming together. [00:44:26] Jay McBain: One is the new buyer. 51% of our buyers now love marketplaces. Yeah. [00:44:30] Jay McBain: The second reason is all the models, subscription consumption, and now micro consumption over the next 10 to 20 years. Favor. Marketplaces. Absolutely. [00:44:40] Jay McBain: So this is, you know, your buyer creating change. This is the marketplaces. The one thing I haven’t talked about, which is a major trend is the new buyer, which is finops. [00:44:49] Jay McBain: There’s a new set of people, there’s 24,000 of them now that are 50% trained in tech and 50% trained in finance, and they’ve been employed now between the CFO and the CIO originally to kind of move around hyperscaler workloads to save money. Then moved out to kind of edge to cloud. Hey, should we run, run this on that old Dell server ’cause we, you know, could do it cheaper. [00:45:11] Jay McBain: And now they’re expanding into this agentic ai, which is the cost to the organization of tech, of every company in the world is outrageous. And the boards and everybody else have a laser focus on it. And now there’s somebody that’s trained on both sides and these, if you go to finops.org and, and study this model, these people love marketplaces. [00:45:34] Jay McBain: It this commit, the $419 billion of commit is coming out of Fin Ops because I don’t want shadow it. That’s right. I don’t want managers putting things on credit cards, bringing in security risks and other things. I don’t want our pub, our data going out to public clouds consolidate. This is becoming a center where the CFO and the CIO are both gated. [00:45:55] Jay McBain: And they are reporting up to the board [00:45:57] Vince Menzione: consolidation. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna open up the, I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot of questions and we have a short period, short window time. Mm-hmm. Uh, but for, for the studio audience, they’re gonna get more time with you all later. But questions I, I see. Is anybody up at the mic or anybody have any questions they want ask? [00:46:14] Vince Menzione: I’ll ask you to go to the mic though, if you can, Erica. [00:46:21] Audience: Well first I feel personally attacked by the comment, um, around the nine different platforms. ’cause I work at Microsoft, so it is a pain in the butt. Oh, thank you. Uh, that was not my question though. Um, earlier, uh, mark and I, I don’t know where he went, but we were chatting about some companies are actually, they are not, they’re drawing a line in the sand when it comes to ai and they’re, they don’t want it. [00:46:46] Audience: And I started to really think about that. And I’m just curious, you know, are what your thoughts are. Are those folks just doomed? You know, are they gonna have to pull it together or should there and could there be an uprising of people that are like, listen, we have got to make some changes here. Not just for compliance and safety reasons, but for human reasons. [00:47:11] Audience: And I’m just super curious on your thoughts about that. [00:47:14] Jay McBain: Yeah, I, I, I can take a stab. Two things to look at is, um, the integration first fire. And if, you know, a certain company in my stack, personal or professional life doesn’t wanna play and my co-pilot can’t go and do the work I need and I have to manually go and do things, I’m gonna stop by kinda like today, if, if somebody doesn’t take, uh, my version of payment. [00:47:38] Jay McBain: I, I find a new place to shop. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So that’s kind of the, your customers are gonna force the change on the integration first world. And then, you know, one thing I didn’t say is 50% of the Fortune 500 fail, and over 20 years, 71% of tech companies fail that aren’t in the Fortune 500 and can’t buy their way outta problems. [00:47:59] Jay McBain: 71% fail within 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. So what creates, you know, change? And if you’re not playing in this stack. And if you’re not having that agent and data model that you can add value, you, you know, this is, I, I can’t see a way forward and that’s why this is different than I ot and it’s different than other changes. [00:48:19] Jay McBain: It’s just the way we’re evolving, uh, as a society and the way we’re evolving in business to, I do agree [00:48:27] Janet Schijns: though that there’s going to be a, not a reckoning maybe is too call of a word. You know, back to the Arnold Schwartzenegger. Um, but there is a, a movement among younger people, gen Z, particularly back to the basics, back to hands-on loving bookstores, loving record stores, loving experiences. [00:48:46] Janet Schijns: And I do think that especially in SMB, if you think about shopping local, there’s gonna be a huge return to anti-technology to places you can go and get away from it. Where the robots won’t be, where there won’t be automation, where like actual humans talk to you. I, I represent this myself. My daughter has a PhD. [00:49:03] Janet Schijns: She was in research analyst in this industry. She’s dropped out of this industry and she’s opening an independent bookstore. Why? Because that’s where the money is for her long term. That bot’s gonna replace her as a research agent, and she sees it and she talks to her friends, and she knows that’s where the money’s gonna be in the local community. [00:49:22] Janet Schijns: So I think in the local community, you’re going to see an anti AI kind of sentiment in small business. [00:49:30] Greg Sarafin: Uh, I’ll just do a quick, quick take. Uh. First, I think co-pilots were certainly the place to start, but we’re never gonna be successful because changing the ways people work is super expensive. Nobody wants to spend that money, especially for somebody that does not have easily quantifiable benefits, which co-piloting does not. [00:49:47] Greg Sarafin: Uh, we are a use case for that at my firm. Uh, the second is that in general, companies want to have big returns that are measurable. Not little returns. And so if they’re gonna allocate capital, they don’t allocate capital. They, they, they have capital projects to make big changes to the equation of their value in the market. [00:50:09] Greg Sarafin: And so genic technology, when it is fully mature, I think will be that break point where you’re really gonna start to see capital allocated in large chunks to then change the way the enterprise operates. [00:50:20] Audience: That makes good sense. Yeah. Alright, [00:50:23] Audience: I have a question. We have a question. I have a question for Greg and then I have one thing. [00:50:26] Audience: So, Greg, you talked about how, you know, with agents, sellers, we’re gonna have fewer sellers. They’re gonna rise to the top, but, and, and the channel’s basically gonna go away. Totally disagree here. And I’m wondering, you know, with agents and looking at channel account managers, partner account managers. I mean, it’s the same thing on this side of the house too, on the partner side. [00:50:53] Audience: There’s so much coming out, so much technology coming out that’s gonna do the same job on the sales side as the partner side and trim that fat. But these channel relationships, like the seller, needs to have the needs to have those relationships. But I see fewer channel account managers, fewer partner account managers, fewer sellers, but we’re using agents to really get the right people to the dance for the relationships. [00:51:27] Greg Sarafin: Yeah. I don’t believe channels going away. My point was fairly, it didn’t make it well. Okay. It was trying to be a little provocative here to get him going, but, uh, I like to get rise. [00:51:40] Greg Sarafin: Yeah. Is you gotta think about your balance. Mm-hmm. And you also have to take to account as this genic technology makes your direct sellers much more effective. How do you rethink allocating cost of sales that way where you have much higher likelihood of draw down and renewals as well as potentially a better customer experience if you do it well? [00:52:02] Greg Sarafin: Right. That’s my only point. You’re still gonna have channels and all this is gonna play out. But my point is start thinking about what is that balance? Because the calculus is gonna change a bit for a whole lot of reasons, including how channel will evolve, right? [00:52:16] Greg Sarafin: Right. And these mechanisms like marketplace, not other things. [00:52:18] Greg Sarafin: So I’m just, the only point I’m really trying to make to you is think carefully about your entire go-to-market calculus and realize that direct. Done correctly with this technology can be a much more powerful way to shape the future of your business revenue plus, [00:52:38] Janet Schijns: oh, and I just have to say, no. I’m so sorry. [00:52:40] Janet Schijns: I really do like you. But yet you have thousands of partners who sell seven to 13 solutions to the customer. You are one solution If you are thinking about your direct team, right? You’re one solution. Yes. I would really focus first on empowering and automating and streamlining in your partner community. [00:52:59] Janet Schijns: Because your direct sales team is much smaller. Um, and then you can apply what you learned in your partner community to your direct team. So I’m just gonna flip that on its head a little bit, um, because I think the efficiencies are more from your partner community that you can get them from your direct team. [00:53:12] Janet Schijns: And again, some 28-year-old that comes in and swears he owns Bank of America, doesn’t own Bank of America, the partner probably does [00:53:21] Vince Menzione: final answer. [00:53:27] Vince Menzione: And I wonder, but I have to keep us somewhat on time. Let’s do it. So, uh, I wanna thank each of you, uh, it was really a provocative conversation, which is what I was hoping for today. So we’re gonna have some more talk and then there was a question about marketplaces and ai, and I’m gonna ask one of either Microsoft or Google to answer that question for Jeff Chewy, who is in the live stream and asked that question. [00:53:49] Vince Menzione: Thank you. So thank you so much. [00:53:57] Vince Menzione: Thank you for joining this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering, and if you haven’t done so already, mark your calendars. Ultimate Partner Live Spring is coming to Redmond, Washington on May 1st and second. This is going to be an incredible event like each of our ultimate partner events. This one is going to be just a little bit better than the one before. [00:54:18] Vince Menzione: We’re having incredible leaders from Microsoft industry leaders talking about co-selling. Marketplaces aligning to Microsoft priorities and more. You don’t wanna miss this event. Sign up today before seats run out. up today before seats run out.

Jay McBain, an industry analyst at Canalys renowned for his insights on tech trends, dives into the future landscape shaped by AI. He discusses the seismic shifts influencing the partner ecosystem, emphasizing the immense investment in AI and the necessity for vendors to adapt to changing buyer behaviors. McBain highlights the rise of 'micro-consumption' and the importance of engaging the 'seven trusted partners' surrounding customers. He encourages businesses to transition from traditional sales models to strategic partnerships, aiming for growth in a rapidly evolving market.

Jon Yoo, CEO of Suger, Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering What is the future of B2B sales in the new landscape of marketplaces and AI? Jon Yoo, CEO of Sugar, joins us to discuss the evolution of B2B sales and the rise of hyperscaler marketplaces. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/q_81pmJct2Q Jon Yoo shares his insights on how companies like Snowflake are leveraging these marketplaces to drive significant revenue and streamline operations. Discover how Sugar is empowering businesses to embrace a consumer-like buying experience, simplifying complex deployments, and automating workflows for greater efficiency. Jon also delves into the future of B2B sales, highlighting the growing importance of AI and microtransactions. Learn how Sugar is staying ahead of the curve by investing in AI-driven solutions and catering to the needs of both buyers and sellers in this rapidly changing landscape. Key Takeaways: Hyperscaler marketplaces are transforming B2B sales: Companies are increasingly leveraging these platforms to drive revenue and streamline operations. Sugar is simplifying complex software sales: The company is bringing a consumer-like buying experience to B2B by simplifying deployments and automating workflows. AI is playing a crucial role in the evolution of B2B sales: Sugar is investing in AI-driven solutions to enhance efficiency and provide valuable insights. The mid-market presents a significant opportunity for growth: Sugar is focused on empowering mid-sized companies to leverage the power of marketplaces. A unified approach to sales channels is essential: Sugar enables businesses to manage all their sales channels, including direct sales and marketplaces, seamlessly. The buyer side of the marketplace is often overlooked: Sugar is addressing this gap by providing tools and insights to empower buyers. Partnerships remain crucial in the B2B landscape: Sugar recognizes the importance of collaboration and is working to enhance co-selling and bundled offerings. Continuous learning and adaptation are key to success: Jon Yoo emphasizes the importance of staying intellectually curious and embracing new technologies. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in now for an inspiring conversation that could redefine your business strategy! Registration NOW Open!!! Register Today! TRANSCRIPT Transcription: Jon Yoo Audio Episode [00:00:00] Jon Yoo: But I think the most untapped potential is in the mid market space where, you know, maybe one of the kind of players who worked at, you know, one of these mega enterprises that we’re doing that has tremendous success goes to work at, you know, a smaller company, as I mentioned before, and they’re bringing that motion, that playbook. [00:00:18] Jon Yoo: to drive marketplace for them. I think that’s very interesting. [00:00:23] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other. We believe, we refer to these as the tectonic shifts. [00:00:29] Intro: All the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together, managed services will be one and a half times larger. [00:00:34] Vince Menzione: Because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models. [00:00:41] Intro: Until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized, and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized. Can you figure out first what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership. [00:01:01] Vince Menzione: Welcome to or welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. Today, I’m excited to be joined in the studio by a leader who’s leading some of the change we’re seeing in this world of marketplaces and hyperscaler co selling. [00:01:20] Vince Menzione: John Yu is the CEO and co founder of Sugar, an innovative company that’s helping leading some of this incredible change and growth, and I’m excited to have him here in the studio. [00:01:31] Jon Yoo: John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me Vince. And by the way, what a great event last night. [00:01:36] Vince Menzione: Thank you. The whole day was amazing. [00:01:38] Vince Menzione: So for those of you who haven’t watched or listened, we have the Ultimate Partner Winter Retreat is on our YouTube channel as well as this. So I encourage you to go there and watch what an incredible session. So many great leaders in the room, including yourself. Well, we, I feel privileged to get to know you a little bit better these last couple of years. [00:01:56] Vince Menzione: Uh, we met, I think it’s almost two years now. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you were just kind of at the early stage of, of starting up sugar. Right. Yeah. Kind of like two garage kind of thing, but it was really, you were very at the early stage and I really want to spend some time learning about you, your company, your journey, and where you hope to take this market. [00:02:15] Vince Menzione: So I thought we’d start there. Like what was the inspiration behind Sugar and talk, talk to us about that journey to this role as the co founder and CEO of Sugar. [00:02:23] Jon Yoo: Yeah, definitely. So I guess if I rewind it back all the way, you know, I, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was 16. So my, my first job, I don’t know if I told you this, but, uh, first company was around like led technology of, can you print these like, uh, display chips, so to speak on a pliable surface. [00:02:42] Jon Yoo: Turns out no one actually wants. Uh, a fricking phone screen on your, like, ski jacket. Uh, so that’s always like, you know, they say a founder is like first, you know, product is, you know, based on technology and then you work your way backwards to the problem. And in this scenario, you know, we really started with the problem. [00:03:00] Jon Yoo: And part of that came from my time at Salesforce, where we saw just how complex these systems can be and workflows can be when you start to expand to multiple channels. But it’s really my co founder and CTO, Changjun, who had the idea and really felt the pain deeply. So, you know, he worked on, he was at Facebook for a bit, was at, you know, worked on AI at Google for a little bit. [00:03:20] Jon Yoo: And then he ended up at Confluent, where he was the tech lead of their marketplace product, you know. And they were doing 40, 50 percent of their revenue through, through these hyperscaler marketplaces. I mean, they were feeling the pain. They had roughly 10 engineers and, you know, tens of ops people, whether in the U S or offshore that was actually helping to, to manage this channel. [00:03:42] Jon Yoo: And so he really felt the pain point, um, deeply and thought, Hey, not everyone has to The, the payroll, you know, to, to go hire 10 engineers and multiple house people to manage this. So why not? It’s very complex. It’s super complex. Yeah. [00:03:56] Vince Menzione: And for those of our listeners or viewers who don’t understand, tell us a little bit more about what Sugar’s mission is and what you, your organization does. [00:04:03] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I mean, super high level. It might sound a little, you know, cliche, but we really want to bring a consumer experience to B2B sales. And we see that these hyperscaler marketplaces is really the best wedge. Uh, for us to, you know, kind of see this, you know, marketplace like activities where, you know, I, I always wondered why can I go on amazon. [00:04:24] Jon Yoo: com and pick up, you know, cameras here or, uh, bed sheets and be able to compare different products, uh, as any consumer does. And, you know, like the, the one click purchase now, and you can have it delivered to your door. Uh, we really want to bring that experience into. You know, if you want to deploy a database, for example, how can you actually do that with one click of a button, uh, where all the procurements, the deployment is, is handled through these marketplaces. [00:04:49] Jon Yoo: And so amazing benefits. We want to bring it and democratize it to like every single B2B software company in the world. [00:04:56] Vince Menzione: Very cool. You know, we talk about at Ultimate Partner, we talk about the tectonic shifts, incredible change and transformation going on in our world, right? Our lives are shifting weekly. [00:05:05] Vince Menzione: It seems, right. We talked about. Uh, deep seek moment that is already past us and, uh, Stargate and all the investments that are going on. Just, just the way the world is rapidly changing. We also talk about marketplace moment quite a bit. Oh yeah. And the role of the hyperscalers. And I still feel that a lot of organizations come at this thing called partnership at it from the wrong angle. [00:05:27] Vince Menzione: And they miss the fact that I say three sets of rails, and maybe it’s more than three sets of rails, but the hyperscalers really with the level of investment. The hundred billion dollar type of investments annually that they’re making each in this world and then driving it around marketplaces that this is a moment that I feel that not enough people are embracing the right way. [00:05:49] Vince Menzione: Would you agree? [00:05:50] Jon Yoo: I would think so. Um, it’s not like, like, for example, with AI, you know, there’s a chat GPT moment where everyone just saw the value. I mean, I mean, it took you 15 minutes to start playing with it, to realize what the possibilities are. And the tectonic shift was immediate. I think marketplace, um, shift or like adoption has been a lot more gradual. [00:06:10] Jon Yoo: I mean, of course this exploded over the past couple of years, but these hyperscaler marketplaces have been around for 10, 12 years. Um, but it’s really only in the four, the past four or five years where you start to see, you know, the marketplace moments where you have companies like Confluent, you know, there has been earnings reports of like CrowdStrike doing so much. [00:06:30] Jon Yoo: I mean, Snowflake, one of our customers was. The first across a billion dollars in AWS marketplace revenue alone. And so I think we’re starting to get to the early majority. Um, we, I’ve seen it personally over the past two, three years where, you know, in the past, it used to be like the, the top, like a hundred companies are doing majority of the marketplace transactions. [00:06:50] Jon Yoo: And we’re actually seeing a ton of early stage startups, you know, growth stage startups that are actually. Starting to really adopt marketplace and, you know, drive all their upsells and renewals through it for all these benefits. Not just like commit drawdowns, but actually leveraging, you know, the speed of delivery or the fact that you can have flexible billing and you don’t have to worry about, you know, debt collections. [00:07:11] Jon Yoo: If someone goes out of business or some, you know, or they don’t want to pay. And so. It’s been super exciting to see that gradual evolution, and hopefully we can play a huge part in accelerating that adoption. [00:07:20] Vince Menzione: I’m glad, I want to tease out what you just said here too, because I wanted to emphasize this. We had this moment where five companies crossed a billion dollars aggregate in transactions, right? [00:07:32] Vince Menzione: And it looked like we were on a greater path, but when you peel back on some of those, it was really the fulfillment, right? They were private offers, these were big contracts, uh, and they were just taking it through fulfillment, uh, through marketplace. To burn down on the commitments. Yeah. But it wasn’t this organic thing. [00:07:49] Vince Menzione: Yep. And you, what you’re discussing now is this, like, how do you organically get at it? Yep. How does a company that maybe is just, uh, just got to product market fit? And they’re taking their product to market and it’s a great product. And how do they utilize the marketplace to drive awareness, to drive buying behavior and for that, those customers burn down, I guess. [00:08:09] Vince Menzione: And I think that’s what you’re talking about. [00:08:10] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I mean, talk about like the moment of marketplace. I actually think that, um, you can kind of break it up into a couple of pieces. I mean, private offers coming in really led to major adoption. I think you’re starting to see the hyperscalers, uh, really think about the PLG emotion. [00:08:25] Jon Yoo: How do you actually. You know, drive like trials and POCs and discoverability really through these marketplaces. And, you know, if I pick, you know, a new functionality, for example, AWS came out with like the buy with AWS functionality where, you know, you can actually, um, embed like the little button into your exact website where you’ve already constructed the website to capture all the foot traffic. [00:08:50] Jon Yoo: And so it’s kind of taking the power of marketplace. Uh, what’s the right word? Like everywhere? Yeah. Extending it. Exactly. Extending it. Instead of actually just curating this storefront where you have to drive for traffic too. And so we get very excited about that. So I, instead of saying like age of marketplace, I’d actually say like age of marketplace PLG, because that’s, that’s the future that I get super excited about. [00:09:13] Jon Yoo: Not just, you know, draw down on, on, uh, cloud [00:09:15] Vince Menzione: commitments there. So you just had a seminal moment, I would say. Congratulations. You’ve raised 15 million series. A, uh, how do you plan to utilize the funds and how are you thinking about your growth? Hmm. Uh, [00:09:29] Jon Yoo: carefully, uh, so that we don’t run, you know, they always say the CEO’s job is to make sure you don’t run out of money. [00:09:34] Jon Yoo: Um, so I, you know, we’re certainly not just like going out and, you know, Buying you didn’t get a Lamborghini. Yeah, absolutely not. Absolutely. We put it all on Bitcoin. I know. Yeah. Um, [00:09:45] Vince Menzione: that might’ve been a good thing a few months ago. [00:09:47] Jon Yoo: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Uh, that’s a whole nother story. I might need a cocktail for that. [00:09:53] Jon Yoo: But, um, You know, we really think about it as investing in R and D. Um, we’ve, I think we have semblance of product market fit, but that’s costly evolving rates. Competitors catch up. The cloud providers aren’t, aren’t stopping anytime soon around, you know, making their own kind of native experience better. [00:10:10] Jon Yoo: Um, and so we’re, you know, we’re going to try to hire a ton of engineers and we are already doing so, uh, to invest. Not just in our core product offering around Marketplace and CoSell, but invest in a lot of AI use cases that we’ve been thinking about for the past two years. We just haven’t been able to, you know, there, there’s all these table stake functionalities that we need, we need to like set the foundation for. [00:10:31] Jon Yoo: Um, and then there’s so many other things around the buyer side of Marketplace because, you know, you talk about, okay, how do we, you know, I think we can shape seller behavior, but it, you know, sellers want to meet the buyers where their budget is and where the ease of transaction is. And I think there’s some level of. [00:10:48] Jon Yoo: Market disequilibrium, where it’s a lot easier for sellers now that sugar’s around and some of our competitors, you know, but the buyer side is still very ignored, so to speak. Um, you know, when, when we talk to our customers who are trying to sell into a mega enterprise, they always talk about, man, it’s really difficult to find, you know, who the right. [00:11:07] Jon Yoo: Like budget owner is, or who the right person who can actually accept the private offer. They struggle with figuring out, you know, let’s say you’re a Walmart and you have. 10 billion committed across the three cloud providers. How do you know which cloud to procure through? Um, if they have 10 different business units, do they have specific, you know, budget for, you know, third party purchases through these cloud commitments? [00:11:30] Jon Yoo: Um, it was the approval workflow because that also sits outside of, you [00:11:33] Vince Menzione: know, kind of their direct approval because you have to go through the procurement process that might be very, especially in a Walmart, exactly. A whole different building than the campus. [00:11:41] Jon Yoo: Exactly. Um, and so we really want to bridge the gap and. [00:11:44] Jon Yoo: And ultimately, once we are able to fulfill both sellers and buyers, we’re able to provide a lot more data and insights, uh, you know, that kind of fulfills the vision of what we’re looking for, of how do we recommend, you know, what type of products to purchase or bundled offerings, et cetera, et cetera. [00:11:59] Vince Menzione: Yeah. When you described to me too, you know, this is why co selling is so important, right? Because they become your Sherpas in a way, because if you are a buyer, You’re working with a cloud provider, absolutely relying on your account executives, your account, their account executives are then relying on the partner tech team and their own organization that are then crossing over to the partner and trying to navigate this journey, which can be very complex. [00:12:25] Vince Menzione: And what you’re saying is you’re going to streamline some of that process. [00:12:27] Jon Yoo: Absolutely. We’re not, you know, similar to like this whole provocative death of SaaS. We’re not saying death of CoSell, you know, with, with this, we’re really talking about how do we evolve what CoSell looks like, you know, beyond just. [00:12:38] Jon Yoo: Hey, let me just go share a thousand offs and hope the spray and pray approach that, you know, a lot of people talked about yesterday. How do we actually make it a lot more intelligent, you know, based on some of these buying behaviors and account mapping and whatnot? Yeah. [00:12:50] Vince Menzione: So provocative question. You’re at the first to market, right? [00:12:52] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Some people call them enablers or marketplace platforms. Yeah. Uh, you came at the problem after a couple other solutions were out there. How did you think about the problem differently? Yeah. And how do you uniquely solve for it today? I [00:13:06] Jon Yoo: mean, first and foremost, we Have tremendous like respect for our competitors and competitions get, you know, it deflates prices and it makes us better, makes us move faster. [00:13:17] Jon Yoo: And I certainly tried to use that to motivate the team around like, Hey, if we’re not moving 10 X the speed of some of our competitors who have a lot more funding, we’re screwed. Um, but you know, I think we have a lot of second mover advantage because. We got started after a lot of these APIs were available and, and, you know, based on changing his experience from Confluent, he knows where a lot of the skeletons are buried, and so we were able to rearchitect it from the ground up to be very API first. [00:13:42] Jon Yoo: So what I mean by that is, you know, I think about it as, Hey, let’s unify all the channels. So an offer is an offer, regardless of whether it’s through AWS or direct or GCP, et cetera. And what that allows you to do is you can build a workflow on top of it. Where you can trigger a series of actions based on any events from marketplace, regardless of which partner it was. [00:14:06] Jon Yoo: And so like, you know, if you, if you kind of talk about, Hey, we can do bi directional lead sync or send offers or, you know, recognize revenue. It’s not that hard and a lot of people can do it. And that still requires a ton of manual effort by different teams. And I think about like in the life cycle of a transaction, there’s like, you know, opportunity management. [00:14:27] Jon Yoo: So like there’s co sell, you know, product that really helps with that. The entire quote to cash process of how do you actually, you know, have an AE that, you know, co sells, but all, or, you know, as part of a co selling motion, but also has to go figure out the account ID, blah, blah, blah. Uh, have a handoff to deal desk or ops or whoever’s managing that process to send an offer. [00:14:47] Jon Yoo: And then, you know, once the offer is sent, like there’s a level of workflows of, you know, reaching out to the end customer, making sure internal teams are aligned. And then once the offer gets accepted, like there’s a bunch of system things that needs to happen, whether it’s updating a field in Salesforce, uh, sending the metadata to, you know, your ERP solutions like we, or NetSuite a lot, uh, so that they’re not double invoicing the end customer. [00:15:11] Jon Yoo: And so all this work, all these workflows are things that, um, people do manually today. I was going to say, well, manual process. Yeah, [00:15:19] Vince Menzione: it’s very, the complexity is astounding. Actually, you described it. [00:15:22] Jon Yoo: Totally. I mean, it’s, there’s whole like products and companies built around these processes and none of them extended to marketplace. [00:15:28] Jon Yoo: And so how do we actually, you know, just sending an offer, for example, uh, is really the beginning part of a very. Long, complex process. And so based on that offer, how do we trigger everything so that people don’t actually have to do manual work? And again, just focus on selling and not having these like siloed operations team having to, you know, send a hundred private offers, you know, in the last day of the month or quarter and freaking out because. [00:15:56] Jon Yoo: You know, we’re having to like enable all of them to even understand what a private offer is and things like that. I think that’s the key to, to removing the adoption and, um, or sorry, removing the barriers to adoption of marketplace. [00:16:08] Vince Menzione: And then I think I heard you say, like, you streamlined it and it’s sort of like one set of tools and then the APIs and signals all come into the one set of tools versus maybe building out on AWS and building out on Google, then building out on Microsoft app. [00:16:23] Jon Yoo: Yeah, totally. Um, it’s, you know, we always talk about like unified experience, um, because the experience that I had with Salesforce was just every new channel has different APIs or requirements or policies, or oftentimes different teams working them. And then there’s usually a team that sits horizontally across these channels, whether it’s IT or ops that are just like pissed off, you know, to be frank, you know, and the sales people don’t care. [00:16:48] Jon Yoo: They just want to close the deal. Absolutely. And so, you know, while we actually serve. Sales and partnership people like frontline, you know, facing customer facing partner facing folks, the, the real power users we found of our product are kind of the, the unsung heroes, so to speak, like deal desk and rev ops. [00:17:04] Jon Yoo: Yeah. [00:17:05] Vince Menzione: And those are the people that have to deal with the complexity all day long. Exactly, exactly. The tough jobs. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, a lot of talk about AI and how AI is going to help us. And then also these, uh, microtransactions and AI, agentic AI. What trends do you see or foresee in the future as this world evolves around marketplaces? [00:17:25] Jon Yoo: Yeah, I mean, couple things. One is, uh, I start with, there’s a lot more self hosted deployments that we’re seeing. So, you know, you think about pure SaaS where it’s all running in your cloud and then like hybrid SaaS or, you know. Uh, whatever else, but we’re definitely seeing a lot more where, you know, the control plane might be running on X cloud, but then they have agents running in the customer’s VPC and because people are very, um, like guarded with their data, you know, we talked a lot about data security and governance yesterday. [00:17:57] Jon Yoo: And so that’s certainly a big piece that we’re seeing around marketplace. Like, you know, AWS, for example, there’s a lot more AMIs and containers that were. You know, getting asked to, to help with, for our customers. It’s a lot more complex to be frank with you than SaaS, but we’re also the only player in the market that’s doing it today. [00:18:12] Jon Yoo: Um, the second part that I’d see is more and more companies earlier on, um, like a lot of these startups. I mean, we came out at Y Combinator and we see AI agents is like 60 percent of every cohort, if not more. And they’re actually having a seminal moment around being able to break into enterprises. So maybe five, 10 years ago, not very common that these. [00:18:35] Jon Yoo: You know, early stage startups to enterprises. Now you have things like companies going from like 1 to 12, 1 to 50 million ARR, um, selling these eight. We’ll see how sustainable that is. Yeah, that’s wild. Yeah. That’s pretty wild growth. Yeah. But they’re leveraging marketplace earlier and earlier in their journey versus a couple of years ago where. [00:18:52] Jon Yoo: They might wait until they get to a certain level of maturity, uh, to actually leverage marketplace. So I think it’s very, very, um, it’s just awesome that, that people are deciding, Hey, we’re going to be marketplace forward from the get go. And there’s actually, you know, as adoption of this channel grows and people move jobs here and there, we’re seeing a lot more of, let’s say some grizzled veteran who have seen what marketplace at scale looks like. [00:19:17] Jon Yoo: They go work at a smaller company. And immediately the first thing is. I want to turn on marketplace because I had such great success. And so this cross pollination across different companies and different segment lines is, I think, a really good thing [00:19:30] Vince Menzione: overall for the industry. Yeah, it’s good for the growth of all. [00:19:33] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And I still come back to the 420 billion in durable cloud budgets. And yeah, so underutilized. That helps. It’s a huge number. It’s the TAM is incredible. So you talked about some customers. I was kind of interested from a partner or customer because the partner. We talk about the word partner and partners are actually customers of yours. [00:19:50] Vince Menzione: And you mentioned Snowflake. I’m just kind of interested on Snowflake because they’re, they’re evolution. They’re a huge player. They’re a platform company. Mm hmm. Like what did they, what did you see from them and what have you seen from the best of the best that you’ve worked with? [00:20:03] Jon Yoo: Yeah, it’s, they, they certainly invested a lot into the tooling. [00:20:06] Jon Yoo: So they had a teams like aligned to, I mean, when you get into an enterprise, it’s not just Snowflake, but almost every company that we see verticalized around, around different clouds. So you have an AWS Alliance team, Azure Alliance team, GCP Alliance team, and then separate teams. Yeah. But then there’s a partner ops team that usually sits horizontally across all hyperscalers. [00:20:27] Jon Yoo: But even then they might have like kind of a business partner relationship. And, you know, what I saw Snowflake do is they invest a lot in automation. Um, so they built a lot of the tooling in house before we came in and just seeing the level of sophistication of like custom objects they created, uh, flows they created, um, is you kind of need that at that scale. [00:20:49] Jon Yoo: Yeah. And so when we talk to some companies who want to learn, you know, cause they always come in and saying, Hey, I want to learn what. X, Y, Z is doing that’s working out so well, right. I think one advice that I give all the time is just have the right tooling that best fits where you are in the maturity curve of marketplace. [00:21:07] Jon Yoo: So, you know, I’ll give you an example. Some people, you know, are very mature and they come in and they don’t have any automation set up and they have like 30 ops people. Literally going into the respective cloud portals, uh, which I’m just going to say it sucks. It’s terrible. Uh, no offense. Uh, and yeah, and you know, they have to have these business partner, like kind of subject matter experts, because if you’re very familiar in AWS console, but you’re not very familiar in Azure and GCP, does that mean that they should have to learn like three different consoles and Update everything in their own internal system as well. [00:21:45] Jon Yoo: So there’s a tremendous stress that it puts on those teams to scale. But then there’s also the flip side where certain companies come in and, you know, they, they see the power of our workflow builder and they’re like, we want to automate this, this, this, this. And I have to kind of, you know, say, hold, hold your horses. [00:22:01] Jon Yoo: Let’s, let’s get a couple of transactions first. You know, we can do it manually. Uh, and then we can start to automate away each pieces because. The way that I think about kind of, you know, not necessarily the world, but product is it’s a supply chain. It’s like, uh, I think about it as a flow chart of, Hey, um, let’s chart out exactly what the flow is. [00:22:20] Jon Yoo: And then one by one, we’ll, we’ll automate that away, depending on, you know, the level of impact or how much frictionless this process can get. And some people just want to come in and do the whole thing. And it’s like, it is not worth my time, your time, anyone’s time until we get the initial. [00:22:36] Vince Menzione: Well, we get, get an old conversation about process and process engineering. [00:22:41] Vince Menzione: And the fact of the matter is you, if you start inventing the process before you’ve actually taken through and shaking it out, you’re really not, you’re, you’re gonna have to go do it again anyway. Yeah. [00:22:50] Jon Yoo: It’s a, a lot of people in this industry talk about playbooks. Um, what’s the right co sell playbook or marketplace operate? [00:22:57] Jon Yoo: Like what does good look like, you know, effectively. And that’s where, you know, right now it does require some discovery, uh, for us to really tease out what is your float today and what’s the ideal state. I think as we evolve our workflow offering, we’ll be able to provide basically like a library or template of plays and temp, uh, you know, yeah, like plays that they can, they can choose, or they can, you know, describe in natural language, what they expect the float to look like, and all these notes can snap into place, or, you know, they can just pick out of. [00:23:30] Jon Yoo: You know, a list of automation that they want, that’s most common that we see as good looks like, and that hopefully should, um, make not just our own cost of service go down, but also provide a lot quicker time to market around the value offerings that we, we provide. [00:23:46] Vince Menzione: So you came in as the CEO and co founder, right? [00:23:49] Vince Menzione: You had a, you had a co founder who had, who understood the problem. What did you do from a startup perspective? Like, how did you think about it as the CEO coming in? What layer did you bring of the observability and change into the process? And then, and then what is the outcome been different maybe than where it was from the beginning? [00:24:09] Jon Yoo: Yeah, uh, I think the first interesting learning was, Hey, listening is valuable. Cause like with any startup or with any, you know, company just starting, usually starting the S and B space and then you move up markets and. That was kind of a goal from the get go, because when we actually started working with a lot of these earlier C startups, they, they want us to want to use us for listing. [00:24:33] Jon Yoo: But then, you know, we realized like we’re not getting the best feedback because they use our tool like once a month if they need to do a transaction. And yeah, you know, yeah, they give me a call and he’s like, well, a few a year. Yeah, exactly. And so then we, we. You know, went over to kind of the mid stage, late stage startups and, you know, volume starts to take up and they start to use our product more. [00:24:55] Jon Yoo: But it’s really when we started to work with like fivetrain, for example, that was doing not just a ton of, you know, marketplace private offers, but a ton of public offers, which we always shared a vision around like, Hey, this PLG motion, but also like billing and metering because they, you know, bill on a consumption based model. [00:25:12] Jon Yoo: And, you know, they had like a 10 tack Google sheets, uh, to. Like massage the usage of ads to, to actually convert to the right billable metric or billable output. Um, and so I’d say that that’s one, just kind of the decision to move up market. The second piece was coming from Salesforce. I, you know, one of my projects briefly was to kind of be the internal PM or like a PM for the internal business tools. [00:25:38] Jon Yoo: Um, like North America, like, like, uh, sales tooling initiative or whatever. And. I realized that people just do not want to ever leave like Salesforce, or, you know, if you use HubSpot HubSpot, um, those are not just a system of record, but it’s also where people like have all the reporting, they really operate their entire business out of. [00:25:59] Jon Yoo: And so the, the first like immediate action that we took outside of CoSell, which is what we learned from our space. Like everyone that does marketplace also CoSells. is we have to have the best native app experience, um, you know, so that people can work the way that they like, where they work. And so we immediately came out with a Salesforce app and we’ve just been iterating on that since the, the last. [00:26:20] Jon Yoo: Do direct interaction or. Exactly. And, and the last, you know, kind of piece that we learned was we thought that having just these being API first, like these unified APIs would. Um, be really helpful for a company like Confluent that has all these engineers who want to leverage these APIs. Turns out no one actually wants to use our APIs. [00:26:41] Jon Yoo: They just want us to do the work for them, which is why we actually, it was painful, but you know, for about six months actually worked on building the workflow refactor entire backend so that I can actually support this. Uh, that was painful, but you know, frankly, we kind of called it initially the improvisation tool because. [00:27:01] Jon Yoo: When we started working with these larger volume, you know, players, they would just come to us with XYZ features and Change and I are just like, holy shit. Like if we just keep building these features for these customers that all vary depending on their Salesforce setup or workflows, we’re screwed. Like it’s going to be a Frankenstein product. [00:27:19] Jon Yoo: Um, and so let’s build something that can abstract all that away and make it customizable to, you know, each respective custom, uh, companies and their very specific [00:27:28] Vince Menzione: workflows. So I have a pyramid, we don’t have the slide here, but I have a pyramid slide. And I talk about the very top of the pyramid being some of the largest software companies in the market. [00:27:39] Vince Menzione: And you can recognize some of the snowflakes up there and Google, uh, Cisco and some of the other real super giants. Yeah. And then there’s kind of the next layer down, which is sort of like the 750 to a thousand software companies. And then there’s sort of this mid market. Where do you see the growth? And then this down below, obviously the digital natives and some startup organizations, but where do you see the growth in that period? [00:28:04] Jon Yoo: Mid [00:28:04] Vince Menzione: market. Mid market. [00:28:05] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I mean, enterprise is not going anywhere, but I mean, if they’re already doing 30 to 50 percent of their revenue through these hyperscaler marketplaces. It’s kind of hard to grow that much more beyond that, but I think the most untapped potential is in the mid market space where, you know, maybe one of the kind of players who worked at, you know, one of these mega enterprises that we’re doing that has tremendous success goes to work at, you know, a smaller company, as I mentioned before, and they’re bringing that motion, that playbook, uh, to drive marketplace for them. [00:28:35] Jon Yoo: I think that’s very interesting. Um, and then. My, my, my hope is that as, you know, there’s a gentic AI and, you know, as companies start to convert to more of like a consumption outcome based billing model where, you know, cloud marketplaces have historically been very powerful in, and a lot of these consumption, you know, pricing models, uh, that they’re going to adopt it more and more, both in SMB and mid market. [00:28:59] Jon Yoo: Um, and so very optimistic about that future. But of course, we’re still, I think our product generally does best with companies with high volumes. [00:29:09] Vince Menzione: And you mentioned you’re putting a lot of the money investment into engineering. How do you think about the go to market strategy? What are you doing there to build awareness around sugar, uh, you know, deliver the right outcomes, revenue perspective for the company. [00:29:22] Jon Yoo: You know, we’ve been super fortunate to have just tremendously talented people join our company. Um, not just on the engineering front, um, but on the go to market side as well. So. You know, they’re all in on kind of sugar and this vision for the future. And it’s funny, like I was saying, like CS is actually the hardest role to, um, enable customer success. [00:29:48] Jon Yoo: Customer success is so hard to enable because, and we have, in my opinion, the best in the industry, but they. Have to learn so much across three clouds, across all the different modules, not just within our product, but like, you know, different programs that are going on at these respective clouds that are also always changing, you know, but from a go to market perspective, it’s really about like selling the vision around like workflows, we just help you accelerate revenue because you can access this amazing marketplace, um, with all these benefits and we help that, that access be very seamless and embedded into your core workflows that you already have today. [00:30:25] Jon Yoo: Um, but the other piece is like cost efficiencies. So it’s not just top line, but bottom line of, you know, do you want to go down this like complex path of a confluent where they have 10 plus engineers working on this, uh, for multiple years and it’s not like a one time set up and go. Um, and so we’re certainly investing a lot more there as well. [00:30:43] Jon Yoo: And not just around awareness of like sugar, but awareness of our space. Um, because I think. You know, we really want to become a thought leader, like, you know, some of the incumbent players out there who have been paving the way for us in many aspects. And, um, we can’t just make it all sugar, sugar, sugar. [00:31:00] Jon Yoo: It has to be about, you know, the cloud partnerships and marketplace. [00:31:04] Vince Menzione: So where do you see this going? Like the journey has been amazing. Uh, the next few years, is it, is it three years? Is it five years? Like what, what are the outcomes you hope to achieve? What’s the vision? [00:31:16] Jon Yoo: Well, this is getting recorded. So, you know, we want to IPO, uh, you know, and, and do this for 10 plus years. [00:31:21] Jon Yoo: Okay. Um, you heard it here. Yeah. Uh, it’s not about calendars. We’re not trying to, you know, be like a cashflow positive or of course we want to be cashflow positive and profitable, but. Um, we’re really reinvesting all of our growth back into the product, um, because we, we don’t want to just stop at marketplace and co sell. [00:31:38] Jon Yoo: Um, we want to make it like interoperable across every channel. Um, so that could be direct channel as well. Um, and what is unique about us is twofolds. Like one is we’re not just about us, but the space. Uh, one is we have the chance to work across. Every persona that touches, you know, uh, a stage in the life cycle of a transaction. [00:31:59] Jon Yoo: And so whether that’s at the opportunity stage with sales and partnership people, uh, throughout the whole quote to cash process, deal desk and rev ops, and the finance gets very involved around rev rec. And so there’s going to be different parts where we can go horizontal across all channels, not just marketplace and co sell, which we get very excited about. [00:32:15] Jon Yoo: But as I mentioned, um, the buyer side is the part that is super exciting to me because it’s untapped. There’s no one really playing that space. Uh, I’m sure competitors will rise, but that’s honestly good for the entire industry, so we welcome that. But the ultimate like, you know, vision that I see that, that I get very excited about is, um, that consumer experience to B2B sales. [00:32:39] Jon Yoo: And if you talk to any CIO of a company, they don’t buy the ROI analysis that sellers are putting in front of them. Or if they do buy it, it’s kind of murky, you know, and if you want, I’m a data nerd, so how do you actually bring a very data? Oriented approach, a very programmatic approach to procuring software. [00:32:56] Jon Yoo: Well, you know, if similar to how I can like buy or like be able to compare different products and all the feature specs, et cetera, where I can do a free trial and get like six different sheets, test it out and then return it with 30 day policy, I would love to be able to do that for a B2B where, you know, the business owner, their unit owner, um, is able to outline a PRD or the requirements that they want. [00:33:23] Jon Yoo: Uh, set a budget for POC across X, Y, you know, and we were able to provide the insights around, Hey, these are the couple of products that, you know, uh, people have purchased that fit these requirements and they can actually set a budget, you know, against those, you know, and that’s part of the things that we’ll, we’ll uncover with the buyer side. [00:33:39] Jon Yoo: Very cool. And, you know, once they actually trial it using our metering engine, they can actually define the outcome that they want to see and meter against that outcome to determine what is the product they should choose the best. And then we can send all this data. Around the outcome to price, you know, ratio to the CIO, CFO, CEO, so that they can make the best decision. [00:33:57] Jon Yoo: Um, and that’s super cool in my opinion, but we’ll see if we can get there. And I think it’s really about sequencing the product lines versus trying to do it all at once. How [00:34:07] Vince Menzione: do you layer in the partner ecosystem into this conversation? Cause I also, as, as you were describing this to me, I was thinking about the different partners along the journey that are part of the, you know, Jay likes to talk about the 28 moments. [00:34:20] Vince Menzione: And you know, you have partners on the front end, maybe doing consulting work. You have other organizations that are coming in as trusted, maybe it’s an SI, maybe it’s some other partners. And then there’s the solution, which in effect, isn’t usually just one solution. Totally. A lot of times it’s like grass security. [00:34:35] Vince Menzione: I’ve got data. Uh, I’ve got Kubernetes, other things I’m layering like Kubernetes and other things that I’m providing here. And maybe two or three. Yeah. And then I’m stitching it all together. Maybe I have an MSP on the back. How do you think about that layering into that discussion you just described? [00:34:53] Jon Yoo: Yeah, partnerships are not going anywhere and they are going to be the tip of the spear in driving this. So just because we provide any recommendation doesn’t mean that that’s it. You have to actually drive that outcome with the hyperscalers, for example, or, or, uh, You know, one of the big things that we see kind of trend or, you know, trend in this industry is like bundled offerings. [00:35:12] Vince Menzione: Yeah, that’s [00:35:12] Jon Yoo: right. So all the, you know, different cloud providers are realizing, okay, how do we factor in services or how do we have two different ISVs go to market together, you know, in this motion with these bundled offerings? And so partners are always going to be kind of at the intersection across. I think someone yesterday mentioned like, uh. [00:35:31] Jon Yoo: Partnerships, the intersection of like tech and relationship or something like that. Yeah. And I, I think that’s so true. Um, and if you see that this bundled offering of X and Y are going really well together, you’d expect the partners to be at the forefront of actually driving a, a joint go to market together. [00:35:47] Jon Yoo: Yeah. And of course with, uh, the top providers as well. Yeah. It’s exciting times we live in. Yeah, totally. Uh, it’s hard to see. What the future will look like completely. And I think every week to week, as we’re talking about before it changes, but, um, it’s super exciting. [00:36:03] Vince Menzione: So for our viewers and listeners today, they want to learn more about working with you, partnering with you, or maybe. [00:36:09] Vince Menzione: Uh, deploying sugar as a solution for their company. How do they do so? [00:36:14] Jon Yoo: Yeah. You know, reach out to me, you know, John at sugar. io, you know, John, without the H sugar with an E, uh, it’s like, say classy San Diego now, um, you can go to our website and, you know, just reach out to us, but, but truly I am all over my email, so reach out to me directly if you want to, uh, to join the growing team or of course, uh, leverage our [00:36:33] Vince Menzione: product. [00:36:34] Vince Menzione: And we have some rapid fire questions. I had some questions I want to ask you today before we, before we break. Uh, so what book is most influenced your work? Hmm. [00:36:44] Jon Yoo: Um, I do two pieces. Um, one is, um, like hard things about hard things. I think it’s a title with, by Ben Horowitz, you know, that’s kind of a very well known startup book, but. [00:36:59] Jon Yoo: You know, it kind of details the, the story of how everything can go wrong at a startup. And, and it does usually, it does, it, you know, the power might go out. Yeah. But you know, it’s painful. And when I think oftentimes, like when you’re from the outside looking in, everything seemed like it’s going smoothly, but internally it sometimes freaking sucks. [00:37:26] Jon Yoo: And, and you have to have uncomfortable conversations or handle crises or. You know, everything seems to be breaking. And so how do you actually keep a level head around it all? Um, and not, you know, lash out or be bannock or, or all these things. And just realizing like, this is part of the journey and this is not anything new. [00:37:45] Jon Yoo: Like every other company goes through some of these hardships. And also when you see some of the crazy stuff that happens in that book, it really tames what we’re going through in some regards. And so I’m like, okay, I always have a saying with the team. Uh, The toughest challenge is always ahead of us. So I’m not even worried about this at the moment. [00:38:03] Jon Yoo: Um, the, the second book is another cliche one a little bit, but atomic habits. Atomic habits. Yeah. It’s, uh, James Cleary. I have a tendency to just want, my eyes are bigger than my stomach in many regards. And I have all these like grandiose plans for myself and how to operate, but, you know, really thinking about how do I create this compounding behavior and. [00:38:26] Jon Yoo: That’s also very similar to building a culture at a company. You know, if, if you have a view on this is what greatness looks like and being a well oiled machine, like it, that doesn’t happen overnight. And so how do I set some of the structure and cadence in place so that we can start to build on that culture by, you know, building block by building block, same thing goes for product development, right? [00:38:49] Jon Yoo: Like, yeah, here’s the ideal state, but if you try to do it all at once, you’re. You’re, you’re usually going to come out with a pretty crappy product. Right. And so changing really believes in iteration, like little by little and just shipping it, you know, without like too much, like hand wringing. And, and, you know, we’ll learn pretty quickly and we’re going to iterate and fix any bugs or, or things like that. [00:39:10] Jon Yoo: So John, what’s one ABI you can’t live without? Honestly, uh, maybe it’s advice, but coffee, I have to have coffee when I wake up in the morning where I am just, you know, cause during the week I’m averaging like four hours of sleep and I just need, we have Celsius in the office, but I’d say, um, two, two real habits. [00:39:30] Jon Yoo: One is I try to get some exercise in, even if it’s 10, 15 minutes, I’ve been, I haven’t been the best about it over the past couple of years. Um, but I, I found that the, my, my mood and. My ability to think clearly does fluctuate a lot based on whether I just get my body kind of moving somewhat active. And so I try to bike to the office, I bike back, and so that’s, you know, 45 minutes to an hour. [00:39:53] Jon Yoo: Um, just You’re exercising. Somewhat. Yeah. Yeah, trying to. What about the sleep? Let’s talk about the four hours. Does it feel like that’s enough? Uh, but I try to catch up on sleep on Fridays and, uh, the weekend. As long as there’s not like a wedding or something. But, uh, it’s a The second piece, by the way, I’m pretty good at operating, you know, without sleep, but it’s certainly something where, uh, I can be a little bit more cranky, you know, if I’ve had like consecutive nights of, of, uh, pretty late nights of work and say the second habit, I always need to do this of, um, the night before the next day, I always review kind of my calendar, figure out what’s really important, figure out what I want to get accomplished that day. [00:40:37] Jon Yoo: If I just wake up and I have to go immediately into a call with like, One of our European customers and I’m like foggy and you know, you’re just in back to backs over and over again by, by, by like 4 PM you’re just like, I have no idea what I actually did. Uh, I was just a zombie work, uh, working through, so I’m trying to be very deliberate by reviewing that same thing with like going into a new week, right? [00:40:58] Jon Yoo: Uh, on a Sunday night, just making sure I know exactly, you know, what the, the goal for that week is. Um, and I try to, we’re trying to set better, you know, similar cadence with all of the leadership team on our team, uh, as well. Yeah. [00:41:11] Vince Menzione: Well, by reviewing the night before your subconscious mind works on it. [00:41:15] Jon Yoo: Oh, yeah. [00:41:16] Vince Menzione: They say that that helps. It helps in terms of like thinking through the problem and getting a solution before you start. [00:41:22] Jon Yoo: Totally. Or like, you know, if I know I’m walking into an important meeting, I have to do some mental prep of like, what are the three things that I really want to get accomplished out of this meeting? [00:41:31] Jon Yoo: If I just walk into it without having even like two minutes to think about it, [00:41:35] Vince Menzione: you’re, you’re, you’re just lost. You’re cold. Yeah. So is there a quote or a mantra that you, that inspires you? [00:41:43] Jon Yoo: Yeah, I, you know, I, I, there is a lot of moments from my days at Salesforce that was, I was so lucky to work with some phenomenally talented folks. [00:41:56] Jon Yoo: Um, and each kind of manager or boss that I’ve had have imparted some wisdom. So I remember, uh, my first manager was Mackenzie. Uh, I was probably a pain in the ass to, or a pain in the butt to, to, uh, deal with this angsty kid who, who wanted to accomplish a lot and do cool things. But she always said, John, like, I think she got frustrated at just all the different products I wanted to work on. [00:42:19] Jon Yoo: She goes. It’s, it’s a Venn diagram, you know, there’s a Venn diagram of what the company and the team needs. And then there’s a Venn diagram of like, or the circle of what you think is cool. You have to play in that little overlap or what the company needs and suck it up, you know? And I try to bring that type of mentality to our team as well, because we, you know, our chief of staff for him, for example, is incredibly ambitious and incredibly talented. [00:42:41] Jon Yoo: And so I always say two things for me, one thing for you, uh, but all three needs to be something that helps the company move forward. Um, I had another manager, Nick, who then this, I think about this every day of, um, you know, motivation is incredibly powerful, uh, and, but it comes and goes and discipline is what gets you through the day. [00:43:01] Jon Yoo: Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, even if you don’t want to do something just like. You know, being disciplined about doing it is, is, and, and setting that like muscle memory is something that is incredibly important. And then finally, sorry, I know you asked for one quote, but I’ll do the whole chronology. [00:43:20] Jon Yoo: My old boss at Salesforce also was Denise Dresser, who is now like the CEO of Slack to have done amazing things, uh, since then. And, uh, you know, she said, uh, she really preaches radical candor. And so I’ve seen her just be incredibly. Like straightforward, uh, and honest with her direct reports around, Hey, this is what, you know, good looks like and asking very tough questions of why this has been done or not been done. [00:43:51] Jon Yoo: And it’s never emotional. It’s very like facts based object, uh, objective. And so I try to bring some of that into, man, into the team as well. [00:43:59] Vince Menzione: It’s good, especially in the startup world. Right. We have to quickly get to the solution to the problem. Yeah. Dilly dally in it. And you talked about like powering through the problem. [00:44:08] Vince Menzione: Like just power through, I think you talked about motivation, but that also helps with motivation, right? Cause when you power through an issue, like even when you don’t, when you don’t want to go do it, you get to the outcome and that kind of propels or helps motivate you to, to continue to do those things. [00:44:24] Jon Yoo: Oh yeah. It’s just a muscle memory. And I always say like, we have to get more at bats. And once you do, once you solve like one very problem, um, the next problem doesn’t seem as hard. Or. It doesn’t seem as daunting if the challenge is higher. So very cool. [00:44:39] Vince Menzione: So I have a favorite question. Okay. I asked this of almost all my guests. [00:44:42] Vince Menzione: It’s a favorite of mine and, uh, you’re hosting a dinner party, John. Okay. Um, you can host this dinner party anywhere in the world. We could talk about locations. It’d be very interesting to hear your point of view on that. And you can invite any three guests from the present or the past, this amazing dinner party. [00:45:00] Vince Menzione: Whom would you invite and why? [00:45:04] Jon Yoo: There are so many. Um, when I was young and I would answer this, or I guess I’m still young, but you know, in my teenage years, yeah, in my teenage years, I’d always joke like Kim Jong-un because yeah, it’s such a interesting character around, um, fascinating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In some ways, , but in reality, I’d say number one would be my, um, my, my grandfather and my mom’s side, who, who, who passed away, uh, my grandfather. [00:45:31] Jon Yoo: Um. You know, many years ago and I, you know, growing up in the U S I didn’t get a chance to spend too much time with him, but I later learned after he passed of some of the crazy stories that he’s dealt with. So, you know, when, when Japan, like colonized Korea, for example, you know, it was in Japan, he got shipped to Japan for a little bit and then actually had to go to a concentration camp up in Serbia or, uh, yeah, or no, not Serbia. [00:45:57] Jon Yoo: Um, what’s the tundra, the frozen tundra. I don’t know the, oh, uh, yeah, Russia where they said, yes, I need to Siberia, Siberia. Yeah. Siberia. And he actually walked back from Siberia, uh, barefoot back to Korea. It took him like many, many months and just showed up in my grandmother’s doorsteps, like thin as a stick with long hair. [00:46:20] Jon Yoo: Uh, I would love to just learn about what type of will it took and how that shaped them as a person for any like hardship down the road. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I want to write like an autobiography about, or not a biography about that. Very cool. Um, I think one of my favorite people is, uh, Jon Stewart. [00:46:38] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I think he’s a, uh, has such a wide range of, of expert, you know, not expertise, but just topics that he can engage in incredibly intellectually curious. And I think I’d be able to. Like ask so many questions or you know, so witty. I want to be Jon Stewart. He’s a funny guy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly and then Final one is it’s kind of a funky one, but Jim Carrey. [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah [00:47:06] Jon Yoo: he’s I saw an interview where he talked about how there’s this face that you put on for everyone and there’s who you are internally and And when you’re an actor or like people kind of pigeonhole you into a specific image, you know, there’s such a hard pressure to live up to that image or be that person when they meet him in person. [00:47:26] Jon Yoo: Um, and not saying I have, I have, I’m like two face where there’s like me, personal John, and then there’s like professional John, but you know, that’s definitely converged more and more as work has become more of my life. And so, you know, one of the things I want to talk to him about is just how do you maintain kind of your self identity and who you are? [00:47:46] Jon Yoo: Even if it clashes with what you need to be in a professional setting, um, or as a CEO of a company. And so I think those are pretty [00:47:54] Vince Menzione: interesting topics. Yeah, because we do have to have a persona in the business world. It might be different than our kind of personal. [00:48:00] Jon Yoo: Yeah, that’s [00:48:00] Vince Menzione: right. [00:48:01] Jon Yoo: Well, everyone has it. [00:48:01] Jon Yoo: Everyone has like the phone voice. Yeah. Or the podcast voice. Yeah. Yeah. It’s very nice by the way. Yeah. I feel your battle voice. [00:48:09] Vince Menzione: Where are we hosting [00:48:09] Jon Yoo: this [00:48:10] Vince Menzione: dinner? [00:48:11] Jon Yoo: Ooh. Um. I mean, anyone that’s gone out with me knows, uh, I’m a big Korean barbecue guy. Okay. So we’re going to be in Seoul at one of my favorite Korean barbecue spots. [00:48:22] Jon Yoo: It’s a little dingy hole, hole in a wall. And, uh, we’re just going to grill some pork belly and, and, uh, you know, beef and have some soju and just talk about life. All right. I’m kind of [00:48:33] Vince Menzione: come join you. Yeah, absolutely. That’d be, that’d be a lot of fun. Meet your granddad, uh, Jim Carrey and Jon Stewart are two amazing individuals. [00:48:40] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So it’s really cool. So, you know, we are living through an amazing time of change and transformation. And we are in 2025 and really the early first quarter of the year. What would you say to our viewers and listeners to help them optimize for their success this new year? How do they need to lean in? [00:48:57] Jon Yoo: Specific to marketplace or just in general, [00:49:00] Vince Menzione: just [00:49:01] Jon Yoo: in [00:49:01] Vince Menzione: general. [00:49:03] Jon Yoo: I’d say, uh, just being intellectually curious and tinkering around. So we’re going through such a rapid evolution in technology and a lot of the. Adoption in like your day to day work setting, for example, uh, because enterprise adoption generally is much, much slower than consumer adoption. [00:49:25] Jon Yoo: And so tinker around with all these different tools that are out and figure out like what the art of the possible is. And just being very curious about that mentality, I think is super important for you to understand what the value of this technology and how it can change the world, um, like me, myself, like I play around all the time with like chat, GPT, clod, like, you know, perplexity to figure out like. [00:49:47] Jon Yoo: Where does the system break? How can it actually enhance my productivity? Um, I mean, just the other day, this is such a stupid use case, but I wanted to like recreate a slide and, you know, I didn’t want to go ask someone on our team to do it. So, and I haven’t written Python in like years, but like just asking Chachapik exactly how I do it, was able to do it in 20 minutes. [00:50:07] Jon Yoo: And now any other kind of work that, you know, I want to be able to do that with, I can leverage this like little snippet of code that, you know, GPT gave me. Or like creating images, for example, for LinkedIn, then there’s so many different applications and you have to tinker around with it to understand what’s possible and what’s not. [00:50:23] Vince Menzione: So I recently downloaded cloud and perplexity. I’m kind of curious. Cause I’ve been using chat GBT, which is your favorite. Chat GBT. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. I [00:50:32] Jon Yoo: think partly cause I just use it for most. Um, but yeah, they’re all pretty good. You know, [00:50:38] Vince Menzione: you can’t go [00:50:38] Jon Yoo: wrong. [00:50:40] Vince Menzione: John, so excited to have you here today. [00:50:43] Vince Menzione: Thank you for making the trip from San Francisco all the way here to Boca Raton, Florida. And, uh, so glad you get to spend time with our viewers and listeners. I want to thank you for your support and partnership. Thank you for joining the Ultimate Guide Department. [00:50:54] Jon Yoo: No, thanks for having me. It was such a blast. [00:50:57] Jon Yoo: Um, I always, as I mentioned, learn something new at all these events and It helps that Boca Raton is phenomenal, you know, and the venue and everything was phenomenal. So I really appreciate your partnership. Appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Perfect. Appreciate [00:51:10] Vince Menzione: you. Thank you. Thank you, John. And thank you to our audience at ultimate partner. [00:51:15] Vince Menzione: We strive to bring you great leaders like John to help you achieve more. If you like our podcast and like watching us on YouTube. Please tell your friends about us and hit the subscribe button on either Spotify, Apple, or our YouTube channel. You can also follow along on TheUltimatePartner. com to learn more about our events, our podcasts, and our community. [00:51:40] Vince Menzione: Together, let’s spark the ecosystem.know. It’s incredible. I know, I just gotta find, you know, block out some time to be able to visit it, but that’s probably where I would hold it.

Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud’s Marketplace and ISV Go-To-Market programs, shares insights on Google Cloud’s impressive growth, skyrocketing from $1 billion to a $48 billion run rate since 2017. He discusses the transformative role of AI and the emergence of AI agents, emphasizing partner collaboration to enhance the customer experience. With a focus on evolving marketplaces and strategic partnerships, Dai provides valuable advice for companies looking to thrive in the dynamic cloud landscape. He also reflects on adaptability and personal insights from his own career journey.

Join Ultimate Guide to Partnering’s 8th Anniversary Episode. “This is the era of the fastest technology transformation in history.” – Nicole Dezen, Microsoft Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/rxlbjXPSM2s?si=sFyBTfxZP_-jt4E0 As we celebrate our 8th anniversary, we’re excited to bring you something truly special. Prepare for an epic video and audio compilation featuring some of the most impactful interviews and insights from the past year. This compilation is a treasure trove of wisdom from the brightest minds in the partner ecosystem. The future of business is shaped by three unstoppable forces: AI, marketplaces, and the evolution of partnerships. We’re thrilled to feature top industry leaders in this special anniversary episode, including Microsoft’s Nicole Dezen, Cisco’s Rodney Clark, and EY’s Greg Sarafin. They will share groundbreaking insights on how AI drives innovation, how marketplaces are transforming go-to-market strategies, and how customer-centric partnerships are unlocking sustainable growth. Whether you’re looking to stay ahead of AI trends, optimize your marketplace strategy, or future-proof your partnerships, this episode delivers the insights you need to thrive in 2025 and beyond. Join us as we reflect on the journey and look forward to a future filled with possibilities. Thank you for being part of our community; your support has been invaluable. Mark Your Calendars Now TRANSCRIPT Anniversary Audio MP3 Vince: [00:00:00] What’s the key to driving exponential growth and innovation in today’s fast paced digital landscape? To commemorate our podcast anniversary, we’re diving into some of the most insightful episodes from the past year, focusing on three transformative themes. AI Trends to Watch in 2025, Harnessing the Power of Marketplaces, and How to Unlock Sustainable Growth. Vince: Let’s dive in and master the future together.  Vince (2): We believe this time is like no other. We believe, we refer to these as the tectonic shifts.  Jay: All the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together, managed services will be one and a half times larger.  Rodney: Because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models. Niti: Until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized, and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized.  Mike: Can you figure out first what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose [00:01:00] and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership. Vince: Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. Well, we’ve been on a tear this year, as we took this podcast from a spare bedroom to a full production studio. And I’m so grateful for your support and the incredible guests that have made our over 250 episodes possible. Vince: Three topics continue to dominate our discussions. AI, marketplaces, and effective partnerships. And with over 50 amazing interviews and our live events, we’ve been fortunate to have some of the industry’s top leaders share their insights in our deep dive on AI trends for 2025 will revisit discussions on how AI is reshaping businesses. Vince: ensuring security and meeting evolving customer needs. Our all star lineup includes [00:02:00] Nicole Deason, chief partner officer and corporate vice president, global partner solutions at Microsoft, as she talks about the immense partner opportunities and innovations brought forth by the recent advancements in AI. Vince: My good friend, Rodney Clark, senior vice president, partnerships, and small and medium business at Cisco, who says it’s essential to put the customer at the center of everything as shifting customer expectations and buying behaviors necessitate rethinking partnership models and enabling partners to connect seamlessly. Vince: Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Canalys, as he highlights the fast growing tech industry and the need to focus on high growth areas. cybersecurity services and a I to achieve significant growth rates. Finally, Ducks Raymond Cy, chief brand officer at AvePoint, who shares the importance of investing internally to embrace a I [00:03:00] preparing customers and partners to optimize their data and developing a I powered industry solutions to address specific customer needs. Nicole: This is the era of the fastest technology transformation in history. You know, if you think about previous technology shifts, whether it’s shift to mobile, shift to cloud, shift to the internet. You know, the, the platform shift and the transformation shift to AI is just so exciting, and the, the fun of my job is I get to work with partners to help them build solutions, services, IP, delivery practices. Nicole: On our, on our AI platform, helping them enable customers to participate in this incredible innovation.  Vince: You know, I’ve been chronicling the shifts. I call it the tectonic shifts we’ve been seeing, right? And it really started before COVID, right? We talked about transformation was happening at a pretty good. Vince: Pace. Uh, COVID really accelerated things. [00:04:00] Satya said seven years of transformation in seven months. Our lives have changed dramatically. We don’t even recognize that any longer, right? Or the way we operate, the way we work, all those things have changed. Uh, but to your point, like the last 18 months have been an astounding rate of change. Nicole: Yeah,  Vince: we go back to the A. I. Moment. It was November of 2022. And then last year, Satya took us through a master class, right? With chat, G. B. T. Open A. I. Microsoft leaned in in a big way here. We can’t have a conversation today without talking about the importance of A. I. Can you expand on this immediate opportunity here for partners? Nicole: Absolutely. It is really an exciting time. And you’re right. The last 18 months has just been this drumbeat of new innovation, new capability. And with every single one of those announcements, there’s partner opportunity that’s come with that. And it’s, it’s thrilling, truly thrilling.  Vince: We make the same type of decisions about buying technology that [00:05:00] we do about buying a vehicle. Vince: Absolutely. Where we talk to the seven or eight seats at the table, our friends, our trusted. To make those decisions. And this is why partnering is so important now and ensuring that all those seats at the table are your trusted as well. Those are the organizations that you go to market with that are surrounding your customers. Vince: I want to talk about that now and how, how you’re viewing this. I know you know about this and you’re bringing it, infusing it into Cisco.  Rodney: Yeah, well, it’s important that all of us put the customer at the center of this. It’s because it is the customer buying behavior or the shift in, in, in customer expectation. Rodney: That has created a need for all of us to rethink our models on at the end of the day, it’s no longer point product. There’s no one thing that we sell anymore that is going to solve a problem at the customer. Data and AI is driving a lot more sophistication in terms of what companies need, and the more that companies invest in data and AI, [00:06:00] they need the assurance that things are going to be connected, protected, and distributed. Rodney: Uh, and secure. Yeah. And so for us, what we’ve been looking at is how are customers buying and how are they ultimately making decisions today. It’s not even the traditional, uh, you know, I. T. buyer. It’s line of business decision makers. Uh, it can be the marketing department making decisions on something like a demand gen, uh, you know, data repository that then connects back into some I. Rodney: T. system that they then use to connect it to you. their overall commerce cloud. It can be a number of things, but for us at Cisco, it’s how are we enabling our programs to adjust to those buying patterns and needs? How are we enabling partners to connect to other partners? I was in a conversation yesterday with our good friend Jay McBain from Catalyst. Rodney: And we talked about the number of organizations, like a midsize organization typically has seven [00:07:00] plus or minus partners or companies that are engaged in helping them sustain their outcomes. When you get into large enterprises, it can be anywhere upwards of 20 to 25. And so for us, as we look to manage and map to those, our program has to evolve. Rodney: And we’ll evolve so that we’re making those logical connections and creating a scenario where we’re basically serving up those seven entities, those seven companies that are going to go deliver outcomes, or we’re facilitating the connection of more. That’s a really significant shift from years past.  Vince: So let’s talk about 2025. Vince: I mean, we’re here now. I mean, I can’t believe that this last half of the decade went so fast. Mm hmm. What, what’s on the crystal ball? What do you see?  Jay: Well, the numbers speak volumes. The world economy is probably going to grow about 2. 6 percent next year, GDP wise. It’s at 105 trillion right now. The tech industry is going to grow by 8. Jay: 2%. So more than triple what the world economy. [00:08:00] It will again for the 10th year running be the number one fastest growing industry, attracting even more professional services folks and people interested in these multipliers. But inside that 8. 2 percent growth, we keep asking partners. You know, what are they going to focus on to, no one wants to grow at 8%. Jay: No. You know, everyone wants to grow at double digits and there’s, you know, certain partners out there looking at triple digit growth next year. So what they want to anchor on is those parts of the market, the buyer, the industry, you know, the geographies, the segments, the product sets that are going to grow by significantly more than eight. Jay: So the trifecta that’s being built in kind of what we’ll call that core channel, uh, that’s been around 40 years. Is cyber security continues to grow by double digits while it grows by close to 10%, cyber services grow at 13 and managed security services grows at 15. Makes sense. So again, you’re growing one and a half times faster than, [00:09:00] um, than the vendor. Jay: So in the services market, you know, next year will be about a 5. 4 trillion industry globally, uh, in all of tech and telco, uh, hardware makes up a trillion. Software makes up a trillion, services make up three trillion. So, in that scenario, services are outgrowing products. Partners are outgrowing their vendors. Jay: Very interesting. And what they’re trying to do is hook their caboose to the vendors that, you know,  Vince: are growing the fastest. Talk more about how you’re infusing AI into your business and how you’re thinking about the future growth and opportunities.  Dux: As, as we discussed, right, there’s AI. But specific to us, you know, there’s really Three things we’re doing today that we think will help us grow and maximize this AI opportunity. Dux: So first, we’re really investing internally, equipping app pointers to embrace AI. I’m not just talking about devs. I’m talking about devs to business teams, you [00:10:00] know, accounting, finance, marketing, and we’re, you talk about drinking the Kool Aid, we’re all in. Like what’s so cool is we use CoPilot, uh, are one of my finance colleagues. Dux: He’s, he’s like the most power user I know, but it’s awesome. Because to us, sure, we can sell AI related products, but the mindset has to change. That’s right. This is just a totally different way of working, thinking, and coding. And it changes every day. It does. It does. And for example, prompting is important. Dux: While AI is cool, it’s really not that smart yet. Yeah. You have to give proper prompts, right? So that’s the first thing we’re doing. We’re investing internally, making sure we’re adopting our mindset. will really embrace AI and, uh, how we can benefit from it. Second is to a lot of customers, it’s still a novelty, right? Dux: It’s new, but we need to help them prepare their data.  Vince: They’re building their muscle too.  Dux: They are. I mean, everybody’s excited, right? [00:11:00] But at the same time, people don’t realize is. It relies on data, and we all know that if you lift the hood under the covers, everybody’s a digital hoarder. Their data estate is a mess. Dux: And the good news is. It’s that draw, that empty draw, that junk draw. That’s right. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the show Hoarders. Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Exactly what it is. People don’t want to admit it, but, but that’s what we’re seeing, right? A lot of organizations are piloting co pilot and then suddenly they realize, Hold on number one. Dux: How come it’s pulling. Information from 20 years ago, or number two, we’re seeing information we’re not supposed to.  Vince: Yeah, that’s, that’s a big issue, right? That’s right. That’s right. You don’t want people to see what the CFO’s compensation is. Yeah. You don’t want them to be able to see the secrets of the organization hasn’t released yet. Vince: Right. Microsoft went through an internal challenge with a, with a press release. 100%. That wasn’t ready for release. And then everybody saw it ahead of time. Yeah. Just this year.  Dux: And, and just so you know, it’s not, it’s [00:12:00] not about people being malicious. Yeah. It’s just that there’s so much information. People don’t know what’s out there. Dux: Are the permissions set up right? So what we’re doing from an AI perspective, is not only we’re equipping customers, but also partners to get their data prepared, secured, and optimized.  Vince: As we examine the value of marketplaces, we’ll also explore how changing buying behaviors, the dominance of hyperscalers, and innovative routes to market are transforming customer outcomes and business growth. Vince: You’ll hear from Cisco’s Rodney Clark, emphasizing the importance of enabling partners to leverage various routes to market, such as managed services and integration services through marketplaces to offer secure networking and AI solutions. Jason Rook, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Microsoft, who talks about leveraging the channel partner sales model and the Microsoft commercial marketplace to capture new opportunities in the enterprise space. Vince: Aaron [00:13:00] Figer, strategic advisor to Tackle. io and Sanjay Mehta, former chief cloud officer at Tackle. io, as they highlight the evolving marketplace dynamics, where customers seek solutions from multiple ISVs, wrapped with services, driving significant growth in B2B marketplaces, with larger, more complex deals around the world. Vince: As well as Greg Sarafin, Global Vice Chair, Partner Ecosystems at EY. Who stresses how AI and platform business models are democratizing value creation, reshaping industries, and fostering the emergence of new business models on a global scale. You’re hitting the nail on the head here about getting the partner ecosystem engaged in this whole marketplace opportunity. Vince: Do you want to expand on that?  Rodney: Yeah, we, we have to get them involved and engaged. A big part of my business here at Cisco, uh, is in something that we call routes to market. What are the routes to [00:14:00] market that are driving customer outcomes, or how, in essence, are our customers buying, back to your previous question, and what are they buying through? Rodney: Managed services for our ecosystem is big because our customers are needing and wanting more integration services, especially as they get involved and engage in things like AI. Uh, a route to market could be, hey, does this, uh, do we involve at scale, uh, a distributor who goes through, you know, a second tier of reseller? Rodney: To get to a point solution, a route to market could be something like, Hey, the ISV as the actual primary integrator.  Vince: Yes.  Rodney: Uh, you name it. Our focus is on routes to market. And what we’ve really been building out for our partners is a muscle around this marketplace route to market. You know, what are we doing to help them get ready and prepared for that? Rodney: Some of it is in just the core, uh, uh, you know, relationship building. Three way between. an AWS, Cisco, and said partner. Some of it [00:15:00] is in getting our partners really, really enabled on our core technology. In order to drive something through a marketplace transaction, uh, transaction, Cisco is double downing, uh, double, uh, doubling down on, on networking and security. Rodney: And so we’ve got to get our partners really You know, built up around capability so that they can sell secure networking solutions through Marketplace. We’ve got to get our partners really enabled on AI. Yes. And, and, and what it means to be a Cisco AI partner so that they can participate in this opportunity that is Marketplace. Rodney: So it gets a bit. You know, multifaceted and multidimensional, but it’s all something that’s squarely, uh, you know, a priority for Cisco.  Vince: We talk about the mid market, the huge opportunity in the mid market. We talk about the marketplace moment, and it’s really driven, not because of Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, so much as the changing in buying behavior. Vince: All the things that are happening, [00:16:00] right? The dominance of the hyperscalers, the cloud commitments, the role of marketplaces. The decision making process changing and the ability to consume against that, but it’s right now. It’s just a it’s it’s just a one to one between an ISV or an SI. And a Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, right? Vince: We, we forget about this buying process and we forget about the influence strategy that’s happening. What the customer is really doing is they’re not directly buying from these ISVs necessarily. They’re buying through their trusted relationships, their existing agreements, the people that have been surrounding their organizations for years and years and years, these trusteds. Vince: And they’re not necessarily somebody at the ISV. So what are you doing to accelerate and capture this opportunity?  Jason: So me in particular, in the role that I’m serving today, I think. The focus is on this channel partner sales model and the way that we kind of think about Marketplace, we think [00:17:00] about Marketplace as a product and within Marketplace, there’s within that product, there’s a number of features and they’re really kind of two core features that enable a non ISV channel partner. Jason: We’ll call them a channel partner to go sell Marketplace or an ISV app through Marketplace. And the one is the CSP motion. I mentioned that that’s been around for a long time. I remember when we. When we instituted  Vince: CSP.  Jason: Yup. And that ability to attach that third party app has been there only recently. And when I say recently, two and a half years ago, February, 2022, we launched the private offer functionality with that. Jason: So now you can do a custom deal. The channel partner can earn margin. The customer can pay below list price, all those types of things. And then in July, last July, we launched what we call multi party private offers. That functionally allows. Any Microsoft partner to sell an ISV application through marketplace into an enterprise customer, which where it gets really interesting because the enterprise space we have customers that have cloud consumption commitments, right? Jason: And they can use those commitments to [00:18:00] purchase ISV apps. So when I say any partner, it really. Like we designed that feature with an incredibly low bar because we want everybody to participate in this motion, right? When I say all you need is a Microsoft AI cloud partner program ID, formerly known as an MPN ID, which you can get one of those. Jason: I have one. Yeah, you have one of those. So you can go transact the deal today. We should do it. Let’s go decorate somebody’s Mac.  Vince: Yeah. Well, what’s important here too, is that it means that Microsoft is going to do the direct billing to the customer.  Jason: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you don’t have to collect. Microsoft’s going to do the collections. Jason: Microsoft’s going to pay you on defined terms. I mean,  Vince: and they’re going to pay you on time, on time, and it might come early with a discount. Firstly, can’t do it alone. We all know that partnerships are important to everybody. Even those of us in the technology side of partnerships. Uh, and then, and then the fact that this journey is, uh, evolving and the role of channel we thought was going to, this is going to kill the channel. Vince: No, it’s invigorating. It’s sparking the ecosystem. It’s sparking  Sanjay: the channel. In fact, you can see in marketplaces, we’re going from single [00:19:00] software vendors, selling a single software title on a single deal to a single customer. And that’s great, but it’s not where we need to be. Like ideally, a customer wants to buy a solution that has multiple things from multiple ISVs. Sanjay: Probably wrapped with some services that potentially come from a channel and might need to buy it with credit terms, or maybe it needs to be metered. You’ve been  Vince: working with some of the largest ISVs. I want to, I want to go back on this moment and this kind of this, uh, really the evolution of where we are moving from the brochure, brochure where, to where we are today, a hundred billion dollar. Vince: Potential by 2026 is tackles call. Yeah, whether it’s whether we get there exactly or not, probably doesn’t matter. It’s just that this is a huge opportunity. What are you seeing? You work with some of the biggest and the best ISVs that are out there doing this. Yeah, it’s interesting.  Sanjay: The first pick a number of 3000 ISVs to marketplace were mostly infrastructure vendors. Sanjay: What we’re seeing now is more and more business application providers. Salesforce announced late last year that they teamed up with AWS to go through the marketplace. [00:20:00] Um, Uh, we do a lot of work with Zoom Info. So another great business application going through the marketplace. So we’re seeing that the next horizon we think is very likely vertical industry applications. Sanjay: A little more traditional. Those industries move a little slower. Sometimes they sell 10 year deals to utility companies. So just the evolution of that’s going to take a little bit of time. That’s right. You hear about data marketplaces and ML marketplaces. So I think we’re really. You’re going to see a proliferation of the types of things you can buy through these marketplaces, which is going to be a big change. Sanjay: We’ve seen deal sizes go up. So there are a lot of myths around these things. Like it’s only really startups selling to small customers. Not true, right? It’s also the biggest company. It’s also the biggest companies in the world and also the biggest buyers in the world and all around the planet, right? Sanjay: Marketplace is not a U. S. phenomenon anymore. It’s a global phenomenon. The best ISVs in terms of performance are doing 50 percent in the U. S., maybe 25 percent or so in Europe. Another 25 percent in ANZ and APAC. Uh, so we’re seeing that we’re seeing bigger deals like in the early days, it was 20, 000 transactions, 40, 000 transactions. Sanjay: Now we’re seeing [00:21:00] 100 million transactions. So the, the type of business that’s going through is changing. So I think just the validation, even though it’s early, we think only about 2 percent of global B2B commerce went through these channels last year. We think 100 billion might be under called in 2026. Sanjay: We’ve seen massive acceleration in marketplace throughput, um, but the validation of this is a channel that’s here to stay and to grow, I think is really firmly validated and now you’re seeing more and more vendors jump on.  Vince: The emergence of marketplaces, which will be a hundred billion dollars according to Tackle. Vince: io by the end of 2026, might happen actually sooner. We had five companies go to a billion dollars last year. Yeah. So it’s crazy what’s happening in terms of the change. What would you say about what we’re seeing right now?  Uh, I’d say buckle up. Buckle up. Um, you know, uh, I think we’re in a tech time. I think we are in a tectonic shift. I think it caught the first tremor was cloud [00:22:00] when we democratize democratized the globalization global access to infrastructure at a near zero cost to get started. We did something really important in tech. And now I think AI and it’s still early, but I think AI Changes everything. Yes it changes uh The type of value you can create for your customer You know, it’ll fundamentally I think it’ll fundamentally even shift industries. I think industries that we don’t even know about will exist and other industries that Did exist will become suppliers to those industries. Like I think there’s going to be I can’t  Vince: Every company is going to be a platform company or they’re going to  be,  Vince: we used to say tech company, but I really think that everybody’s changing the models are changing dramatically. Vince: Yeah.  And, and, you know, you know what my favorite platform platform company is. What’s that? RYOBI. RYOBI. Go to Home Depot. Oh yeah. Those yellowish greenish [00:23:00] tools with the batteries. That’s a platform. That is a platform company. That’s a platform model. Absolutely. I, I am stuck on that platform. I have more damn yellow tools than you can, anybody ever should. You’re locked in. And I’m locked in. Locked in. I’m on that platform. And so yes, I think the concept of platform business models creates stickiness. and ease, right? They’re easy and they’re sticky. And so they’re really effective models. Now, not every business will be a platform business or have a platform business, but you will, you will, I think, see that business model be the predominant winner in, uh, unless it doesn’t make sense for a particular use case, right? Vince: We’ll also uncover key strategies to unlock sustainable growth and innovation, highlighting the shift from traditional sales models. to dynamic trusted advisor roles that will create unprecedented opportunities. We’ll learn from Cassandra Golston, [00:24:00] CEO of PartnerTap, as she and I discuss the shift from vendors to trusted partners and the importance of automating co selling to drive business growth. Vince: EY’s Greg Serafin goes on to detail the importance of strong risk and controls, frameworks, regulatory compliance, and efficient operational structures in forming successful partnerships, managing complex deals and maintaining transparency to achieve sustainable growth. Janet Shine, CEO and co founder of JS Group. Vince: Emphasizes the need for a trust driven ecosystem, stressing that true partnerships involves treating partners as part of the team, integrating multiple parties seamlessly, and focusing in on commercializing innovation within the ecosystem. Finally, the one and only Dr. Michael Gervais, founder of Finding Mastery. Vince: Who discusses the critical intersection of high performance well being, [00:25:00] emphasizing the importance of investing in the psychological well being. Of employees to drive sustainable growth and create an environment where they can both thrive personally and professionally. Getting rid of the old mindset within the organization, the old CRO. Vince: Right. That used modern marketing like Marketo and Aliqua and HubSpot, and then relied on an SDR, BDR, and a, and a seller at the end of it, that, that, that. That playbook goes away,  Cass: right? Because buyers are getting younger. They don’t trust sales people. I mean, this is, this is the research coming out, you know, from, from Forrester Maria Chin. Cass: Um, and, and so. It’s all, so there’s this shift, right, from vendor to partner, and the partner actually oftentimes has that trusted advisor relationship,  Vince: so. Well Microsoft got [00:26:00] it early, right, so I had it in the DNA of Microsoft, but Microsoft even struggled in the early days. And look at them, the most  Cass: valuable company. Cass: In the  Vince: world.  Cass: Exactly. Yes. Everyone’s looking to Microsoft going, what are they doing? And I have a little secret to tell you Vince that even at Microsoft, everybody’s operating on spreadsheets when we’re talking about co selling. And this is where, you know, we talk a lot about, um, Co sell and co selling, so co sell being this transaction, this, you know, one and done through marketplace and co selling being this verb where it’s an action and it’s top of funnel, you know, where. Cass: Should we be running plays? How do we orchestrate those plays before an opportunity is even created? That’s the future of co selling. Could never, [00:27:00] it’s, it’s what we were doing on spreadsheets. Yes. Or trying to do on spreadsheets. Completely not scalable. They’re, the, like, it’s hard to drive strategy around that. Cass: And so, you have. These co sell desks, which are extremely reactive instead of, you know, where we see this heading is with automation, you know, companies like partner tab have come out, um, you know, and we’ve been around since 2016 building and, you know, enterprise ready for scale. So it’s, it’s, it’s such an exciting time that we can move these companies from, you know, these random backs of co sell, which we call everyone’s. Cass: Sending spreadsheets around and trying to do this top of funnel activity. Um, and now with automation, with a platform where you can identify securely share account opportunity, date [00:28:00] data, align, um, drive white space plays, drive upsell cross sell plays, drive multi partner plays where you’re engaging top of funnel. Cass: It’s yeah, that’s. That’s, that’s where we’re  Vince: going to, yeah, that’s where we’re talking ecosystem, which is why we, we use the term spark the ecosystem. I love  Cass: that.  I was very fortunate to, you know, you don’t usually say you’re fortunate when you have an internal audit, but I had three internal audits over the course of seven years. And each one I was glad for, because when people would say, well, is your data accurate? Yeah, I’ve, I passed internal audit three times. Nice.  Vince: Nice.  Right. I love it. Um, internal audit is your friend. Third line of defense is actually your friend. Um, in many instances, particularly when you’re trying to do something where people have disbelief. So the other piece here is we’re a regulated entity, right? Right. Again, we go back to that. We have the great privilege of creating transparency in public markets, but that is also creates a lot of regulatory, uh, [00:29:00] hurdles that we need to work through in order to do partnering. And uh, correctly so, by the way, uh, so I have to also provide for an adequate first line of defense. Right. To make sure that we don’t cross any regulatory boundaries. And do something that would harm our clients and harm our enterprise. So I also, that’s one of the less, you know, interesting and fun things, but it also contributed to us creating real structure because we had to have a really strong risk and controls framework, really good processes, great transparency. We, I mean, we, you know, I’ll give you an example. We had a private equity firm acquire, uh, uh, an entity that we had a relationship with, and because that private entity firm, uh, was restricted, because we audited some of the other entities in the fund, we had to terminate the relationship with this particular firm. Yep. And. We were able to [00:30:00] demonstrate to the firm. We had hundreds of resale contracts and you know local country addenda You know how there’s a lot of paper a lot of commercial paper a lot of activity in these relationships We knew where every single contract was in every single country and we could show a plan to Shutting all of that down within the transaction window fantastic, right and that’s for 10 basis points Well, you’ve you created an engine We created an engine because you know, and this is the engineer in me. That’s right. Right building PCs. I’m a dealer I’m a deal person. I’m a deal maker. I think you can tell that the My my oxygen is when I go out and do a flywheel deal with a microsoft or a dell or a service now Right flywheel deals are like I love them But I also know that at some point I won’t be able to do them if the cost yeah And the complexity drags it down. The ops have to be right. Ops  Vince: have to partner. Ops have got to be any organization, right? The ops have to be right. So partner needs to be [00:31:00] a standalone organization or thought of that way. That’s  right.  Vince: And get your own ops, right?  Yet it doesn’t own sales motions. The revenue function owns sales motions. It doesn’t own product. Product owns product, right? It doesn’t own any of these things, but it creates the framework. And the processes to let them all come together and not even know they’re coming together in a sense, because it’s just, which is how we do it. Right. And when people are just like, like, they don’t even think about it, then, you know, you’ve, then, you know, you’ve crossed that chasm and now that organization is unlocked to be able to take that journey. You know, I talk about things like mindset,  Cass: commitment, trust,  Vince: 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.  Vince: Uh, go back to Greg and Greg, you’re getting a lot of kudos here today, but I think about the ability that we talked about the influence strategy and the ability to be credible, to have trust. Right.  Vince: With that [00:32:00] leader, that partner leader. Correct. It cannot be the person who was the channel chief last week, now just changing their title.  Well, 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 to explain or help the C suite and the board, I sit on several boards, right? And having that conversation, being asked to present to other boards, being asked to be an advisor to a board on this topic is, it’s not about routes to market.  Vince (2): That’s right.  That’s been true. 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.  Vince (2): 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: Yeah. What’s the answer you get when you ask that question? We  can’t do that. Right. Then you’re not ready. You’re not [00:33:00] 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 brand. Yes.  Vince: Yes. This is right. Vince: This is the joint value proposition. True  integration. Right. And it’s multiple parties. That’s right. And so what we’re seeing now is some heroes. We’re starting to see the alliance manager who has long been tasked with this.  Vince: Yeah.  Webbed, weird, fuzzy roll, fuzzy roll, press releases and product releases and trying to manage one of your biggest. Customer slash partner slash developer slash slash they’re starting to rise up as heroes because this kind of nebulous territory has been something that they’ve, 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. I have no doubt of 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.  Vince: And a lot of it is the [00:34:00] vendor partner role or vendor channel role, which is more one sided.  Correct. And I am not, so that the audience hears me, not saying that the channel chief role goes immediately away tomorrow overnight, because that would be a primary function. Right. It’s a primary function. It’s like, it would be like saying your direct sales leader’s 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,  Vince (2): right?  That makes sense. It’s the layer above that. It’s the understanding that you could be in a, in a sale, right? There could be 37, as I mentioned earlier, partners. And so in that scenario, you don’t get to be in charge. And this is the hardest conversation I have because 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. [00:35:00] Want the audience to hear that. But those tenants,  Vince (2): right?  They don’t work in a partnering world and this is where my sales world,  Vince: this is where the shift in mindset 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, right? 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 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 announced 10 things. Ooh, with IBM, we’re doing this. We’re doing this with Microsoft. We’re doing it all over the news. How many sales did you make? Not very many.  Vince: Goose eggs. Goose eggs. Yeah.  And so you’ve been doing these press releases, you have been in effect partnering, you haven’t figured out how to commercialize that. Vince: That’s right.  And that’s where the alliance leader, the  Vince: chief revenue officer, the CFO, that’s where everybody, so this [00:36:00] is that whole influence strategy, corraling that whole group together in the right And if you  really 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 should you 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? Do you not think the CISO is a detractor for you sometimes or whoever their security consultant is a detractor for them making progress? Vince (2): That’s right.  Oh yeah. And how about the website guy? Whoever’s running their website and e commerce, do you not think the website e commerce provider is not a detractor for your service? You’re saying we could put chatbots in, they have their own approach to it. Your call center application, your CKAS application fails. Do you really think they like you when they just did a web campaign and they’re getting judged on ROI? You have detract natural detractors. So partnering is not just about the positivity, 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? Vince: So, uh, we could riff all [00:37:00] day here on this topic. I mean, we can talk about mindset, execution, uh, executive commitment. Cause that’s, this all ties into this. And we divorce some of this from business, right? We think about this as maybe health related. We don’t, we don’t bring it into the room in the corporate world in a way, but you did, in fact. Vince: And I want to come back to a time when you got to work with us when I was part of the pilot program. I remember you walking around the room that day, and you were coming, we were like in small groups, and you were walking around and checking in on us. And you said, Hey, yeah, I’m going to be meeting with Satya Nadella next week, like first time, right? Vince: You hadn’t worked with the leadership team. That’s right. Yeah. And so we were already in, I think we were in Northern Virginia at a really nice resort doing this. This thing that we were doing around high performance with you, um, and then, you know, flat, uh, fast forward now, right? It’s, uh, over 10 years. I think it’s been, has it been 10 years? Vince: It has,  Mike: yeah.  Vince: And, uh, Microsoft was at a very different point in time, but Satya [00:38:00] seemed to embrace what you were doing in a big way. And I thought maybe you’d spend a few moments here because a lot of what you just mentioned from a personal performance he took into the corporation. And he asked you to help him align it to his executive team, his leadership team, and embrace around this big mission, their vision for Microsoft at the time. Vince: I thought maybe you’d spend a moment there because I think it sets us up for the rest of the conversation. So Satya  Mike: is, I think, one of, if not the, um, most meaningful CEOs of our time right now. So, and I don’t say that because, um, of the working relationship, but the way that he values, the human experience and the solution slash product. Mike: Um, and, and he’s not wanting to extract the best out of people for. Wall Street or for a better product, he is [00:39:00] fundamentally committed to invest in his people in a way that I hadn’t seen before. And so when we first sat down, um, the idea was how do we create for the 224, 000 people at Microsoft, how do we create an experience for them while they’re here that they will feel like this was an incredibly enriching part of their life? Mike: Maybe the most meaningful part of their professional career, like how do we create that environment? And the simple. The simple, reflective answer was like, let’s invest in their psychological well being for greater performance. Okay, so wait, how do those two things cross? I want to introduce a phrase, um, which is high performance well being. Mike: High performance well being. What does that mean? So it’s not, we used to believe that high performance began where wellness ended. And that was something we all swallowed in the elite sport world. You really want to be a high performer. Hey, there’s some sacrifices that [00:40:00] you have to make, like, are you really up for it? Mike: We were wrong. We were flat out wrong. And high performance well being, the combination of those two words. is the intersection that I’m most fascinated by. To commit to mastery, we need to have a sustainable growth arc. And that sustainable growth arc with as much progression and agitation for growth that you can have requires a base of well being for higher performance. Mike: And what does that base consist of? Uh, it’s basic recovery, connections with other people, and mindfulness a la awareness practices. So that’s kind of the base of awareness. Uh, We are majoring in the minors, if you will, for much of the best practices for people to be better. So what do I mean by that? The big rocks are the major components. Mike: Eating right. I mean, [00:41:00] it’s not cool, you know, to get the salad with the light vinaigrette or whatever and while everyone else is grabbing like the really tasty stuff. You’ve got to be really committed. In those moments, because you want something. Um, sleep. There’s so much I want out of life. There’s so much that you want out of life. Mike: But shutting it down to get your 7. 4 hours or your 8. 2 or whatever the amount of hours that suit you well. It’s a really important, difficult thing to get in. And a world that is on and your second shift starts at like 845, you know, cause you haven’t answered an email yet. Cause you’ve been jammed with, with meetings and preparing for the family, you know, meals or whatever it might be. Mike: I’m trying to get a little gym time in and the third variable is making sure that your, your carriage is fit to manage the stress required to live a great life. Um, and then the last practice is to knowing, [00:42:00] knowing how to use your mind to eloquently adjust. It’s all the curve balls that come up in life. Mike: And so those are the big rocks for well being and then you can layer on top of it a psychology for high performance. And so that’s, I didn’t answer your question about Satya, but he wanted to make a fundamental commitment to helping people know how to use their mind well. They’re already really smart. Mike: Intellectual horsepower, as you know, is through the roof. They’re systems thinkers. They’re trying to solve complicated stuff. It’s a complicated internal ecosystem. They are truly the multinational of multinationals. And, um, so he said, right, but we need to go from know it all to learn it all. We need to know how to use our mind to be great learners. Mike: And if you want to have a, any type of culture, you can put in any fancy words. Satya chose growth mindset. You want any of those fancy words. [00:43:00] that matter to you and your organization. My proposition is you must train people’s minds to deal with the stress that comes with that aspiration. Because it’s under the moments of stress that we find out what we’re really made of. Mike: I agree. Do we become prickly, scratchy, irritated, intolerant, frustrated, or do we stay graceful, do we stay connected, do we stay in a learning mindset, in a solution mode? And if you don’t have the psychological skills to stay in those high heat moments, well, people will never know what they’re capable of, is kind of an easy idea, I think, to understand. Vince: Thank you for watching and listening to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. We’ve been on this journey together for eight incredible years. And we have exciting plans ahead for this year, including four live in person events. We’d also love for you to get more involved in our community, and here’s how. Vince: Keep watching and listening to our podcast [00:44:00] on your favorite podcast channels. Or on our new YouTube channel and join our thriving community, the ultimate partner experience. You can do so by subscribing to our free newsletter at the ultimate partner. com or become a member to our exclusive ultimate partner experience community.Vince: Well, you’ll have access to other leaders and all of our gated content from events and more. Let’s continue to unlock growth and innovation together.

Jason Graefe joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering “What took cloud 15 to 20 years will happen in 5 years with AI. The pace of advancement is absolutely astounding. The software companies who will come out in front are the ones experimenting early, staying curious, and thinking beyond their current constraints.” miss this high-impact conversation on thriving through change!” – Jason Graefe Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/7gjHC2jKXd4?si=5ikd9uhxiCW6T3em In a revealing conversation with Microsoft’s Corporate VP of ISV and Digital Natives, Jason Graefe shares unprecedented insights into how AI is revolutionizing software development and why the next five years will be transformative for the industry. Key Insights from Microsoft’s Leadership After witnessing the first demo of GPT-4, Graefe recognized that a fundamental shift was occurring in technology. “What took cloud 15 to 20 years will happen in 5 years,” he declares, highlighting the unprecedented pace of AI advancement. With 23 years at Microsoft, including seven years working directly with CEO Satya Nadella, Graefe brings unique perspective to how software companies can position themselves for success in the AI era. He emphasizes three critical lessons learned from Nadella’s leadership: Systems thinking is essential for operating at scale Curiosity drives innovation and learning Empathy balanced with strong leadership creates transformative results The Rise of Agentic AI Graefe reveals a significant shift from chatbot-focused AI to agentic AI architectures, where multiple AI agents work together through partner-to-partner interactions. This evolution demands software companies think differently about their strategy and partnerships. “Software companies need to be able to interact and engage in a partner-to-partner motion much quicker than they have in the past,” Graefe explains, highlighting how workflow automation will increasingly rely on multiple integrated AI agents. Advice for Software Companies For organizations navigating this rapid transformation while maintaining current operations, Graefe emphasizes: The importance of early experimentation with AI Need for clear leadership direction on AI integration Focus on responsible AI deployment with security and safety at the forefront Reducing friction in partner engagement processes Looking Ahead As Microsoft moves into fiscal year 2026, Graefe’s focus is on making Microsoft the partner of choice for software development companies. He emphasizes the need to: Reduce friction in partner engagement Improve program accessibility Enhance value delivery through the platform Support safe and responsible AI deployment Bottom Line The message is clear: AI transformation will happen faster than cloud adoption did, and software companies need to start positioning themselves now. Success will come to those who maintain their current business while actively experimenting with and implementing AI capabilities. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in and transform your cloud marketplace approach! For more insights and detailed discussions, tune in to the full episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Subscribe to stay updated with the latest trends and strategies in technology partnerships. SIGN Up for the Live Steam – Feb 20, 2025 Ultimate Partner Boca Winter Retreat Sign Up for the Live Strean NOW!

Regina Manfredi Joins Ultimate Partner LIVE in Dallas “Adaptability is the ultimate competitive edge in a rapidly shifting tech landscape. Regina Manfredi shares powerful insights on AQ (Adaptability Quotient), bold partnerships, and modern selling strategies that drive success in today’s evolving market. Don’t miss this high-impact conversation on thriving through change!” Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/FibSmm-moLc?si=qXczpNRL1RRQOzl2 This Fireside Chat from Ultimate Partner LIVE in Dallas was so good we had to share. Join me for this interview with a true partnership leader, Executive VP, and General Manager @ Crayon US as we explore their pivots to thrive during these tectonic shifts. We explore the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) concept and its rising importance over IQ and EQ in the tech-driven, post-COVID world. Regina Manfredi, Executive Vice President of Crayon, shares her insights on adaptability as a new superpower. Regina discusses the dramatic shifts in Microsoft’s partner incentives towards cloud-first and services-first strategies and how Crayon’s focus on customer and partner ecosystems aims to navigate these changes. Emphasizing the need for modern selling techniques, Regina highlights Crayon’s investment in both its people and technological infrastructure. She also touches on the critical role of partnerships in delivering optimal IT solutions and customer experiences. As organizations face the complexities of AI adoption, the episode underscores the necessity of adaptability and collaboration in achieving transformational success. 00:00 The Importance of Adaptability Quotient (AQ) 00:59 Introduction to Crayon and Its Mission 02:42 Challenges and Changes in the LSP Community 04:48 Adapting to Microsoft’s New Incentive Structure 05:16 Building a Strong Partner Ecosystem 08:48 Infusing Fun and Human Connection in Business 10:30 Modern Selling and Customer Engagement 16:17 Investing in People and Technology for 2025 18:06 The Role of AI and Infrastructure in Business 23:25 Final Thoughts and Advice for 2025 Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in and transform your cloud marketplace approach! For more insights and detailed discussions, tune in to the full episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Subscribe to stay updated with the latest trends and strategies in technology partnerships. SAVE THE DATE – Feb 20, 2025 – Limited Seats Available for the Ultimate Partner Executive Winter Retreat For details and to reserve your seat

Wondering How to Navigate Cloud Marketplaces for Ultimate ISV Success? “When you have the alignment across the C-suite, and even if it’s a small business, at the highest level of the organization, they can be well aligned with the ecosystem in a way that’s going to benefit them,” says Justin Murphy, CEO, CloudAtlas. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Get ready for an insightful journey in this episode of “The Ultimate Guide to Partnering” with host Vince Menzione and CloudAtlas CEO Justin Murphy. They delve into the essential strategies ISVs need for cloud marketplace success, exploring Justin’s fascinating transition from simplifying enterprise procurement at SADA to leading Cloud Atlas. Discover the transformative role of marketplaces and co-selling, and learn how top-down commitment, strategic planning, and C-suite alignment drive unparalleled success. Uncover the challenges and opportunities within different cloud providers and understand the pivotal role partnerships play in the tech industry. https://youtu.be/nEpz_OAphCA?si=jSK8fQVb9kQajx2P As Justin highlights, “Applications will be available across all clouds, and leveraging marketplace products can drive the consumption that cloud providers want to see.” This forward-looking perspective emphasizes the necessity for ISVs to adapt and strategize for long-term success in the cloud marketplace. Key Takeaways Market Opportunity: Learn about the immense opportunity in cloud marketplaces and how to leverage it. For instance, Justin mentions that leveraging marketplace third-party products can significantly drive cloud consumption and benefit cloud providers. Strategic Planning: Discover the steps to create a successful go-to-market strategy and address any gaps. Justin discusses the importance of understanding the product and identifying onboarding, sales, and technical gaps to build a comprehensive strategy. Co-Selling Benefits: Understand how co-selling and leveraging marketplace commitments drive growth and opportunities. Justin highlights that even large partners like hyperscalers and managed service providers find co-selling essential to success in the complex enterprise market. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in and transform your cloud marketplace approach! For more insights and detailed discussions, tune in to the full episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Subscribe to stay updated with the latest trends and strategies in technology partnerships. SAVE THE DATE – Feb 20, 2025 – Limited Seats Available for the Ultimate Partner Executive Winter Retreat For details and to reserve your seat

A Reis Barrie Masterclass on Ultimate Guide to Partnering® I asked Reis Barrie, CEO of Carve Partners and an expert in co-selling, to join us in the Boca Studio for this Masterclass to propel your success as a Microsoft Partner. Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Join Vince Menzione for an inspiring conversation with Reis Barrie, co-founder of Carve Partners, as he shares his journey from healthcare to tech and his mission to simplify Microsoft partnerships. From pivotal career moments to leading packed workshops at the Ultimate Partner Executive Summit, Barrie delves into the art of aligning joint goals with organizations like Microsoft to drive revenue, co-marketing opportunities, and operational efficiency. Discover how mastering sales, operations, and marketing fundamentals helps partners avoid distractions and achieve long-term success. https://youtu.be/-2SCIfBz7ng?si=MV6l-vURDTUiqSSa Barrie also addresses the common pitfalls of Microsoft partnerships, emphasizing the need for alignment across teams, building a solid operational foundation, and translating “partner speak” into measurable enterprise value. With insights on navigating Microsoft’s complex ecosystem, Carve’s evolution into a revenue-focused consulting firm, and leadership lessons drawn from Patrick Lencioni and Bruce Lee, this discussion offers invaluable strategies for scaling partnerships while staying focused on what truly matters. Watch now for actionable advice and inspiration! Key Takeaways: Operational Alignment: Streamlining processes and integrating tools like Microsoft Partner Center ensures seamless collaboration and visibility across sales and marketing efforts. Focus on Fundamentals: Mastering core areas—sales, operations, and marketing—helps organizations maximize their Microsoft partnerships while avoiding distractions from overly complex initiatives. Importance of Collaboration: Aligning goals and leveraging expertise across departments reduces inefficiencies and drives partnership success. Leveraging Microsoft Tools: Platforms like Azure and methodologies like MSEM enhance co-selling efforts and strengthen relationships with Microsoft’s sales teams. Value of Operational Support: Dedicated resources for operations ensure profitability, build trust, and maintain credibility within partnerships. Scalable Partnership Models: Transitioning from high-touch services to scalable frameworks enables long-term growth and sustainability. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in now for an inspiring conversation that could redefine your business strategy! For more insights and detailed discussions, tune in to the full episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Subscribe to stay updated with the latest trends and strategies in technology partnerships. SAVE THE DATE – Feb 20, 2025 – Limited Seats Available for Ultimate Partner Executive Winter Retreat Contact us for details and to reserve your seat – john@theultimatepartner.com Keywords: Microsoft partnerships, partner collaboration, sales alignment, operational efficiency, partnership strategies, Azure deals, Carve Partners, ISV success, Microsoft ecosystem, partnership pitfalls, sales engagement, joint goals, marketing alignment, enterprise value, partner operations, MSEM framework, cloud budget, deal tracking, customer consent, scalable partnerships, co-marketing benefits, partnership alignment, revenue generation, organizational goals, partner readiness, sales workflows, leadership philosophy, Microsoft tools, operational support, competitive collaboration.

Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Canalys, shares his expertise on the evolving business landscape and the critical role of partnerships. He predicts a transformational shift in sales and marketing due to tech advancements, emphasizing the importance of a data-driven approach. Jay discusses the growth of digital marketplaces and hyperscalers, alongside the sustainability challenges facing the tech industry. With insights on AI and political dynamics, he highlights the necessity for companies to adapt and collaborate for success by 2025.