Episode 12: Effective Partner Marketing with Alex Whitford from Channext

The theme of our 12th podcast episode is Effective Partner Marketing.

Joining our host Jeremy Balius to discuss all things content market automation is Alex Whitford from Channext

Summary

In this conversation, Alex Whitford, VP of Revenue at Chenix, shares his insights on effective partner marketing. He discusses his background in channel sales and the lessons he learned from his experience at Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alex emphasizes the importance of operational excellence in building successful channels and advises channel chiefs to focus on partner engagement and maturity. He also highlights the need for customized and automated marketing content that provides value to partners and end users.

Alex envisions the future of partner marketing to involve multi-vendor collaboration and AI-driven demand generation.

Key Takeaways

• Operational excellence is crucial in building successful channels.
• Focus on partner engagement and maturity, rather than recruiting a large number of partners.
• Provide customized and automated marketing content to partners to drive utilization and engagement.
• Collaboration between vendors is essential for effective partner marketing.
• The future of partner marketing involves multi-vendor collaboration and AI-driven demand generation.

About Alex Whitford

Alex Whitford is the VP of Revenue at Channext, helping businesses understand how to hit hyper scale through technology and channel strategy.

With 8 years of building channels across Europe, Middle East and Africa, he has developed extensive relationships with key leaders and businesses who have taught him the key steps to building a killer channel that scales itself!

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.

Jeremy Balius: Hi. Welcome to this episode of the B2B Tech Marketing Talks podcast where we engage with leading marketing and channel leaders to get fresh perspectives and practical advice on the latest trends, effective strategies and best practices for B2B tech marketing.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is Effective Partner Marketing.

I’m very excited because I’m joined by Alex Whitford from Channext. As the VP of revenue, Alex helps businesses understand how to hit hyperscale through technology and channel strategy. His eight years of building channels across Europe, Middle East, and Africa have taught him how to build thriving channel programs.

This was a fascinating conversation. It was interesting to talk about the learnings and the experiences that Alex had when he was leading distribution for Zoom in EMEA, especially because it was during COVID when Zoom was the fastest growing app in the world at the time.

As he’s working with channel chiefs every day, he’s got a really unique perspective on how to help leaders get hyper focused on the way that they are building their channels, focusing on the operational aspects of the build and getting that right.

But then understanding how to shift over into channel marketing and partner recruitment and sales enablement of those channel partners can add so much value to your thinking.

It’s also amazing to hear about where he sees partner marketing headed, particularly in vendor programs that need to support partners across many different regions across the world.

And I’m really excited for you to hear about where he thinks demand generation in the channels headed. And with that, let’s get into the conversation.

Hey, Alex, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Alex Whitford: Yeah, Jeremy, really really excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Jeremy Balius: I’m super excited to be speaking to you today.

Today’s theme. We’re talking about effective partner marketing, but before we dig into that exciting topic, I’d love to go back and. Uncover what’s your origin story. How did you get started in the channel? How did you become VP of Revenue at Channext?

Alex Whitford: Perfect. Yeah. I think like a lot of people who wound up in in sales and certainly in channel sales it was more by accident luck than design.

I just applied for a random job after university and I ended up in a distributor. a distributor ultimately was acquired by Scansource, but a really very focused on AV, high performing, high relationship team. And really that was the foundation for everything because that taught me so much.

I often tell people that, that. The people who know most about channel starting distribution because they spend so much time interacting with both vendors and partners that they have a much more holistic view of what the channel is. And so various roles within one distributor went to another distributor again, roles in sales and new business and the vendor side as well.

And then I ended up setting up Nubius’s cloud division which the first vendor I signed was Zoom which was I’d love to say really smart. It was a bit of dumb luck. We could see that they were really making moves and then COVID hit. And so obviously everything went nuclear and then ultimately a chap named Ravi Patel, who ran channels for Zoom for EMEA.

He brought me across to run Zoom’s distribution strategy. So I was responsible for everything distribution and master agency. And that taught me. Loads around what works at a vendor, right? And obviously we had the most enormous tailwind of basically any company ever. So lots of work, no sleep made mountains move very quickly.

It was an amazing effort by the team and in really trying circumstances, but let me know. Just how important operations are to make to make channel work really effectively. Cause I think we spend a lot of time talking about how do you generate demand and how do you grow and do all those things.

And what you notice when you have a massive tailwind is actually. If you don’t have your operations nailed, it becomes a prohibitor. And so fundamentally it’s taught me a lot about building channels. And then yeah two years ago I was approached by the CEO of Channext, they needed to build out their partner team.

And obviously with my time in distribution and at Zoom I’ve run partner acquisition strategies for years. And so really understanding how, what partners care about, how to bring them onto a platform, how to get them engaged. And so I joined Channex two years ago. And then just over a year ago, we became Channext VP of Revenue.

So responsible for our entire customer side and our partner side.

Jeremy Balius: It’s so incredible and so exciting. And I just get goosebumps hearing about just imagining what some of this had been like for you, just not just creating. Channels from scratch and building them and advancing them. But I’d really love to start with your experience at zoom, heading up distribution in EMEA fastest growing app in the world at the time during COVID.

What was that like? It must’ve just been getting punched in the face every day. Having the best time of your life, but what was it like for you?

Alex Whitford: Yeah. Finally my grandma understood what I did because I worked for a named brands that was that was useful at Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Being able to explain, Hey, what do you spend your time doing?

So that was good. Punched in the face, I think is an understatement. I think it was punched in the face. Repeatedly. Every single day I actually interviewed Laura Padilla on on my podcast partnerships unraveled and she was the global channel chief at zoom through COVID. And we were discussing how challenging it was.

We went through something like 900 percent growth, quarter of a quarter. And so it was. Insane. The the company scaled from 3,000 people to 5,000 people in two years. And so when you go through that level of growth by person and by revenue, it is wildly challenging. And then adding onto that, it was work from home.

So I, ironically, I started at Zoom and left zoom and I never met anyone in the office. In a two year cycle, right? So it was. Crazy. However, it was the most challenging in some ways and most enjoyable in other ways. And taught me so much about when you are that high and you look down at all these partners and all these regions that have different priorities and care, how important messaging is, how important consistency is, how important is following up on what you say you’re going to do and actually delivering on promises that you’ve made, because what we’ve seen, what I see consistently is.

If you walk those back, relationships are damaged and those relationships takes years and years to heal. So I think fundamentally it taught me about caring for the partner more than anything else, making sure that we do right by partners. And if you do right by partners, you’re a long way then they will do right by you.

And so that’s always the sort of, when I sit down with channel leaders and I see the ones that are really changing the game, they just have this obsession about Customer and partner and getting that right and the rest of it will just work itself out. And I think Zoom taught me that more than anything else.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, incredible. I would just imagine that coming out of that process, that even your personal growth would have just been phenomenal as you’ve seen and experienced so much that it’s shaped your career from there. And the way that you’re making decisions, your speed, the way that you’re able to walk with people.

Back if something’s not working or course, correct. It must have been such a transformative experience.

Alex Whitford: Yeah I’ve I’m a really big proponent of finding mentors who are way ahead of you and guide you through. And luckily I’ve had a, I’ve had a few That really taught me about ruthless prioritization.

And that sounds obvious yeah, obviously focus on the things that really matter. But when your day to day comes, it doesn’t actually land, right? You still get distracted by the things that are in front of you, or maybe the things that you enjoy doing more. And what you realize is the reason ruthless prioritization matters is when you turn the floodgates, when you open the floodgates.

That’s the only thing you can do, right? Because otherwise you’re just going to drown. And so that really now, when I lead my sales team and we talk about what are we trying to deliver? How are we focusing on impact? I just know I’ve got this wealth of experience that sometimes I made terrible decisions because they weren’t just in front of me.

And what happens is. It takes months to unwind them, right? It takes months to pull that back. And so really sitting down, slowing down planning and executing in a way that you are hopefully extremely focused on where this is leading, not just, Hey, the customer says they need this or, Oh, I’ve got an unhappy employee, right?

It’s about, okay, really pulling it back to what is going to deliver value. For the customer or for the partner and ensuring that we start there.

Jeremy Balius: I think your background and your experience and the expertise that you’ve gained is such a resource to others.

You’re in front of channel chiefs all day, every day, by and through what you do, there’s a lot of ISVs that are building channel programs and you’ve built them yourself from the ground up, we tend to see a lot of them focus on the operational aspects versus they’re building them.

How are you advising them when the program is built and they need to shift over into, okay, we need to acquire partners.

We need to enable partners. We need to market through partners. What’s that process? What are you taking them through?

Alex Whitford: The first piece of advice I would give any channel chief is get your ops right first, right? So the channel is a long game. It’s not a fast game. And so you’re building channels to be successful in two years.

Yes. But you’re building channels ultimately to be successful in 10 years, right? That’s the whole motion.

We see businesses now handing down their direct SMB business to channel because it’s more profitable, more sustainable, both in terms of They generate more revenue, but also you don’t have to hire hundreds of people to manage the customers.

You can delegate that responsibility away, but you’re not doing that for wins in Q4. You’re doing that for wins in Q4 2027, right? So it’s about that long term vision. Ops is critical to making that.

But then as you flow past operational excellence, right? How do we API order? How do we provision licenses perfectly?

So you’ve got that foundation built. One mistake that I see. Almost everyone making is about 80 percent of partners that you on board do basically nothing. And this isn’t the Pareto rule. This is partners churning due to inactivity.

And so that partner maturity motion to get them into self sustainable, repeatable revenue, that is almost an afterthought to partner recruitment.

And to me, that’s. That’s the wrong order. We should be focused on recruiting less partners and ensuring a high conversion of partners through to success.

It’s, it’d be similar to running a direct business. It’d be, it’s amazing. We’ve got a thousand SQLs, but if your conversion from SQL to closed one is 1%, That’s a waste of time, right?

And so instead, raise your bar for an SQL and then you’ll improve the conversion. Instead, what we do, because we either delegate it to distribution or to marketing, we recruit thousands of partners knowing that we’ll be pleased if 10, 20, 50, 100 partners actually become mature.

And so I would really encourage people to approach Operational excellence and partner excellence the same way, which is on high conversion.

So how do we really dial in who we want on? And then how do we ensure that we give them the enablement and tooling and the automation to make those partners wildly successful so that we don’t have this operational lag of having 10,000 partners on a partner portal who’ve barely logged in and never done anything because there’s huge incumbent cost to managing those.

Jeremy Balius: This is so fascinating to me, and this is not the way that the mature channel programs are operating. They’re the opposite.

What are those benefits that you’re talking about? What are you decreasing on serviceability costs for the supporting those partners at a technical level? What are these benefits that you’re talking about?

Alex Whitford: So if it was tech, technical cost, I’d say have at it, right? Because frankly, the cost of adding 10, 000 partners to a partner portal is a fraction, right?

The problem comes in the operational lag of people managing those partners, the competition that it adds to your channel. So you just have partners, they’re not invested in your program. They’re going to just undercut pricing because, Hey. Seven people said, one end user went to seven partners and Hey, I’ll just undercut it.

And that devalues that your program to a partner that maybe is more heavily invested. The conflict that introduces between sales reps or potentially your direct organization and. If you’re miss selling product, you’re burning that end user, or if you’re miss onboarding partner, you’re burning that partner.

And so it’s about incremental gains, right? I’m not opposed. If you see Microsoft and Cisco to call out two brands who do this wonderfully, they have no problem. Thousands of partners, right? But their program has been built over decades. And so they’ve incrementally added and added. And so they’ve got a historic wealth of value that they’re able to cascade.

When I look at newer ISVs years old and they’ve got 70,000 partners. And I really say, Hey, if I could just get rid of half your partners, would you notice? And if the answer is no then really you’ve incurred a cost that an enormous one. And so it’s not about having a hundred partners. It’s about having the right amount of partners to make your program as successful as possible.

And really the right amount of partners is the partners that’s going to get you to target this quarter, this year, next year and the year after. And so I know if I could. Speak to and I do speak to lots of channel chiefs and I could wave a magic wand. They will talk about partner engagement, right?

Once you’ve got 10,000 partners, they want their partners to be more engaged, and that’s a function of not having too many partners. It’s about understanding how, especially within your long tail, how you drive partner engagement. And that for me is the number one. opportunity that I see within the channel today.

And I see Microsoft and Cisco make a huge strides to solving that problem. And for me, if you can get that bit right, then suddenly you don’t have a 80, 20 rule or in some brands and 95, five rule, you suddenly have this groundswell of, Oh my God, if we could get, we could double the revenue of the lowest 50 percent of partners that represents enormous strides forward.

And that is. Hard to execute, but valuable to execute because you’re turning that long tail on.

Jeremy Balius: Talking about partner marketing or partner enablement, the most common tactic we see is HQ loading up templated campaigns into a channel portal, you’re talking about something.

Alex Whitford: I think campaigns in a box as they’re lovingly known are a great idea.

The problem is you’re solving the wrong problem, right? That works for partners who don’t have much time, but understand how to do demand generation or how to use assets. That’s not true of 90 percent of partners globally. I was on a, I was on with a global channel chief yesterday and he just called out.

He was like, Alex, I, we’ve got all these assets. Utilization is so low and I’m just wasting money. So do I get rid of my marketing team? What would you advise?

Because for him, he’s saying that we’re spending all this money creating assets and partners aren’t solving them. And I walked him through my sort of thought process, which is you’re solving for the wrong problem.

The reason partners. Don’t use the assets is because most partners don’t have marketing headcount, right? The average SMB partner in in the U S is 12 FTE. The average FTE required to have a marketing user is 49. That is an enormous difference. And so creating assets in the hope that a marketing user who doesn’t exist uses them, solves the problem in the wrong way.

So the question becomes, how do you drive utilization? And there’s one word, automation. It’s the only way you can solve that problem. And then that’s how you turn those wonderful assets that people create and actually get them used. The hockey stick that you generate from making that happen. Suddenly you can have.

You go from having a hundred partners marketing on a monthly basis to a thousand partners marketing on a monthly basis. That 10x difference drives enormous improvement in three areas.

The first part of maturity, second partner engagement, and third revenue. Why? Because once those partners start marketing consistently.
They start speaking to end users more often that drives a requirement within their sales and technology teams to understand the product more more deeply so that they can have those conversations competently. Once the end users start registering more interest, they have those conversations more consistently.

Guess what? Salespeople love that, right? They want to hit quota as much as you do. And so if they’ve got end users who are engaged with them, they are engaged with your program. And then the lag is obviously revenue, right? Marketing works shock. The problem is marketing that sits in a partner portal and isn’t used, does nothing.

So how do we drive the real problem, which is utilization?

Jeremy Balius: That’s a fascinating way to think about it. And I think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people, but they’re not thinking about it in that context. Not just that there’s no marketing FTE, but the expectation that a founder of a 12 FTE headcount MSP would have the ability to implement something is irrational, but it’s an expectation.

Alex Whitford: It’s extremely logical. It follows my mind. It’s extremely logical, right? I completely understand why, how we’ve got here, which is if I’m a marketeer, I look at things from a marketing lens. If I’m an engineer, I look at things from an engineering lens. If I’m a salesperson, I look at things from a sales lens.

And so you look at the problem of. Poor marketing adoption and you go how do we improve the marketing? And that is makes completely logical sense, right? It’s oh, if I can 10 X the quality of the marketing, hopefully adoption will go. And by the way, the data shows that is true, right? Shock Apple who have the strongest brand in the world.

Their adoption is really high with their top partners. Why? Because people love to market a brand like Apple, right? Just look at the iPhone. That’s just come out. It’s amazing. Everywhere online, amazing, right? So they do an amazing job. However, as you head downstream and you start to think, okay, but what are the mechanical issues?

That’s a utilization problem. And so I think fundamentally we don’t understand how to solve that easily. It’s a simple problem to understand a hard problem to solve for. And so the question is, how do you solve that? And then watch as when you solve it, you radically change your program.

Jeremy Balius: There is a belief in the market on the automation component of what you were just talking about, that a vendor will only give me product technical spec sheets and marketing assets that are completely irrelevant to what I want to push out and I won’t have any control over the automation because it’s just going out to prospective end users.

That’s not really the case anymore. In what ways are you talking to channel chiefs about the way that marketing can actually add value to these thousands of service providers and partners that they have in their channel without the partners getting upset that they’re somehow being misrepresented by their vendor?

Alex Whitford: I’ve got three words. And this is the three words that have steered me from basically about day 40 in my career at distribution to understand how partners work and understand how vendors work. My team, when they hear this, we’ll probably start laughing because I basically open every meeting with it.

What’s the objective. So we don’t provide marketing to be kind. We don’t provide marketing because we like it. We provide marketing for a reason. And so what’s the objective is the objective to drive awareness. Great. Then create awareness campaigns. Every marketer worth their salt knows how to do that.

And then we can just get partners. It’s demand generation. That’s different, right? It’s a product story. And so fundamentally the right marketing to give the partner aligns with the objective of you and the partner. And so when I speak to MSPs and they say, Hey, Alex, we are struggling to generate demand, we can solve that problem.

When I speak to a different MSP and they go, no one knows this brand, but we really like it because it does this really cool thing. And we want to just inform the market thought leadership. Excellent.

We can solve that problem as well, but it’s about radically focusing on what the partner cares about. And so one of the things that I see, and I I am going to call someone out who I think does this amazingly well, a chap named Chris Jones, who runs a AT&T’s channel globally.
He talks about how do we understand the partner? We put the partner at the center of our entire focus because for him, he understands that partner lifetime value grows when we understand what our partners care about. And I think that mechanically makes sense in action.
Most people are too busy, aren’t focused on impact, don’t care about it.

And so they understand it, but they don’t execute. If you understand what the partners care about, it becomes so much easier to provide them with what they need. And then you can roll it back. And if you do that repeatedly for days, weeks, months, years, your partners will grow intrinsically.

If they care about awareness, because you have this really cool feature and they want to educate the market, inevitably end users will turn around and say, huh. That’s really interesting.

And then we can cycle back or they’re struggling to generate demand. If you are the brand that helps them generate demand, what do you think that does for their engagement?

Goes through the roof. They are bought into you. And so focusing in on the types of assets and the types of messaging starts with partner conversations.

Jeremy Balius: Partner at the center that’s that needs to be on the billboard on every street. That is fantastic. I love the way that you’ve articulated that. I want to take this a bit forward partners on average have 12 plus vendors in their stack.

They are. Having competing conversations with those different vendors to varying degrees, probably on the size of the partner and the consumption that they’re driving and what their trajectory is looking like from a growth perspective and how important they are to each individual vendor.

But all of those different conversations are having. Are being held independent of each other. And so the partners effectively running 12 different marketing programs with each of them, as the vendors are only wanting to support them for their platform or their widget or whatever it is that that they’ve partnered with them for.

Where do you see the future of partner marketing heading? And is there a potential of overlap between vendor partner co marketing programs? What does that look like?

Alex Whitford: Yeah. Maybe I can juke left for a second. So one of the things that I. I’ve I’ve encountered when I’ve spoken on my podcast, I think we’ve had 50, 60 guests on and ranging from, C-level within the channel, all the way through to local marketing and channel leaders.

One of the things that I’ve found unique about AWS is that they are the most customer obsessed business in the world. Fundamentally, there is no argument.

They are the most, and it’s one of their key principles. And it makes sense because it comes out in the language and the behavior of every single person I’ve interviewed from AWS, which is amazing to see.

So let’s focus back. What’s the objective? When we speak about marketing from a partner to a customer, there is a simple objective, it’s to provide value, right? And whether that value is thought leadership, whether that value is sell more products, because that’s going to help them protect their business or whatever it is, right?

That’s not to market a product. It’s not to market a brand. No partner in the world wants to market a product or a brand. They want to market the holistic solution in, I know of no, Companies that provide an end to end holistic solution for a business. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t include networking and communications and security and everything else around it doesn’t exist.

And so what the MSPs care about and what the partners care about is how do I provide the story to the customer in a way that provides maximal value. That’s not one brand. It’s not two brands. It’s all the brands coming together. And so where do I see it changing? The brands that get that the fastest and work on how do we provide the most value?

With Hey, multi vendor deal registration. Hey, multi vendor campaigns, multi vendor demand gen. How do we provide the assets and the technology integrations in a way that make the partners most successful? I’m sorry.

They’re the ones that win and they are going to win. So big as a result, and the ones that fail to take that stride, unfortunately, I think they’re going to go the way of some of the old technology because they’re just going to fall so far behind because there is lots of technology that is good.

And so what matters when technology is broadly similar. It’s how good your go to market is, and the go to market will radically improve for the brands who have the confidence of competition to say let’s work together to provide not just a technology integration, not just Apple works with Microsoft, right?

But the marketing integration and the sales integration to make the channel go to market as efficient as possible. Now we’re talking about sort of channel 3. 0 and the ones that get that right will just win. And I think they’re the only ones that are going to be around in 10 years.

Jeremy Balius: I’m totally on board with you.

There is a real gap in the way that many of these vendors are viewing their partner as a vehicle to sell more consumption, right? Or to sell more widgets of something. But they’re not.

Viewing the partner as a standalone brand with its own story, that is attempting to build trust with an end user business who doesn’t care about what vendor logo potentially is on the backend.

And so the way that you’re describing the different vendors coming together and converging behind this partner in a collaborative way, I think is fundamentally so exciting.

Alex Whitford: Brand is changing fundamentally, right? It used to be the case to use the obvious example used to be the case of Ford. Was the brand now it’s Tesla and Elon Musk. There’s a face tied to it, right? It’s not the logo. There is a face behind the logo. And so as the end user, as the customer becomes more aware and does more research, we see, I think it’s 56 percent of buying now in B2B starts on LinkedIn, right?

It starts by the end user educating themselves. And so what’s really important about that is there’s lots of technology that broadly does the same thing. It used to be the case. And there’s that old joke, which I think is somewhat true. Which is you don’t get fired for buying Cisco, right? Which makes sense.

If you’re a global it director and we’re built, we want a networking solution. We know that Cisco is an amazing brand. So we’re buying Cisco because they’ve got credibility on credibility. The market also changes and now end users start to do more comparisons, more analytics, more self education.

And so as the end user becomes more self aware, the responsibility of brand changes to not just rely on his historic data to say, we’ve always been amazing, but to inform the customer is where we play brilliantly is where we’re not so good is where we partner is where we have an Alliance. And then to give that.

That information, not directly to the end user, but from the voice of the partner, because that’s the person they trust. Now we’re talking about a game that just radically different from how it was in the nineties and radically more valuable for the one entity that really matters, which is the end customer.

Jeremy Balius: Absolutely. A hundred percent. Where do you see the future of demand gen in the channel headed? What’s next?

Alex Whitford: Yeah. So maybe to start here’s where demand gen is today. So there’s two levers to demand gen. We lovingly call it channel push and use a pull channel pushes Hey, partner goes out to an end user and they say, we have a problem and we look through it and we recommend a solution.

The end user says, Hey, we have this security problem. And the partner says, trust me, you should buy this technology. You should buy brand a here’s why. Perfect. It’s how most businesses done what we are seeing is that end user pull is becoming more relevant, right? Customers are doing more research agnostic of partners.

And so they will start to think do I want to buy a Ford, a GMC, a Tesla? And they’ll start to look themselves, right? And then they might narrow that down to one or two. And then they’ll go and speak to someone.

Now that’s a radically different buying pattern. And so what we see is the businesses that can do channel push and energy to pull do really well.

Cisco, Microsoft biggest brands in the world to do this. Perfect. Right now. Having been the guy that was at zoom through COVID, if you can get one of these you want end user pull. Now I’m not saying anyone should start a pandemic, but if you’ve got this influx of demand coming, then that’s where you’re going to win.

And so what we see as the biggest growth lever is how do we generate more end user pull? And that’s where demand gen is headed. Right now at the moment. We solve that problem direct, right? So Microsoft or Cisco, they have an amazing end user marketing brand where they market direct, whether that’s through brand awareness sponsoring the F1 or whatever it is, they can market direct.

They also market direct paid advertising and all of it. And then they provide value to the partners by also generating demand with that demand is generated at a top heavy level. MDF programs are heavily weighted to the very biggest partners.

Again, because it requires manual customization. And so where I see the world headed is unfortunately, I’m going to say AI and be really boring, like everyone who’s talking about the future of of the future, but AI is going to change the game because we can apply automation and AI to create customized multi vendor content from the voice of the partner to generate demand.

Now that’s the perfect encapsulation of where demand will go. Multi generate multi vendor AI generated, fully automated demand from the partner.

And that, when you get that bit suddenly what’s happening is the end user who’s doing more and more self awareness goes, I trust Jeremy. I’ve been buying from Jeremy for for 10 years.

Great guy. Oh, and Jeremy’s talking about this brand and this brand with this problem. That’s exactly the problem I have. Perfect. I’m going to go and speak to Jeremy cause he’s the one I trust. That is a radical shift from where demand gen is done today. And ultimately I think that’s the only place it can and will go.

And fortunately AI is the catalyst to drive that customized content together. But if you can make the marketing process as operationally automated as buying licenses are today, that’s what will happen.

We’ll get this amazing transition into businesses being able to, to thousands of partners, hundreds of thousands of partners across the world, being able to market their own brand powered by AI.

These great vendors to customers that they already have relationships with.

Jeremy Balius: And in a blended multi-vendor approach.

Alex Whitford: Correct. So the only way this works is multi-vendor unless we get into a world where one vendor really can do everything. We are yet to see it. And I think that the best example would be Apple, right?

Apple, the iPhone. Yes, they have Apple maps. But they also have Google maps, right? They have ways. Why?

Because as an user, you want a best of suite. I want the best individual things tied together into an operational process, which is why the app store is an amazing piece of technology. The same will be true of end customers buying through B2B, right?

I want operational efficiency, so it’s really easy to buy, but I also want a cohesive story between the brands that I am buying because that is the best for me as the customer. And what I’ve learned from AWS is. You’ve got to get the customer value, right?

And then work backwards to the partner and work backwards to the program.

And so that’s why we see these marketplace technologies like AWS, Azure, GCP. How do we purchase by marketplace? Cause that’s operationally efficient. That’s the best thing operationally for the customer.

And then the value is the joint ISV. Integration from a tech perspective, but then also from a go to market perspective, and so that just ticks all the boxes in my mind for what the customer needs.

And then if you have AI to smooth out the operational process of delivering that, then we’re into a really good.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, and a seriously scalable game.

Alex Whitford: Yeah, which, the whole point of channel is hyperscale, right? It’s, we can do more by partnering than we can do alone. And that’s not just because we ship boxes all over the world.

So we need distribution and they stack them high and sell them cheap. And then the partners do the grunt work of installing. It’s much more than that. It’s about being the trusted advisor at scale in local language with local relationships.

But with the power and the backing of the biggest technologies, companies in the world, their assets, their collateral, their operational excellence, and then you have the best of both worlds, right?

This this division or democratization of go to market where. We love buying from local partners. I buy from a local partner. His name is Matt. We go for beers every now and again. He’s a really good guy. I trust him. And I know if I call him on a Sunday, because I have a crisis, he will do something about it.

That’s the value that I want as a user. But I also really the slick branding and the technology of the biggest companies in the world. So how do you marry those two together? And if you get that we’re into a, an amazing position of value for everyone involved.

Jeremy Balius: It’s exciting. It’s so exciting. Amazing.

Alex, this has been so fantastic. I’ve, I feel like I’ve got a lot to process and reflect on based on the way that you see things moving and where it’s all headed. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Alex Whitford: Jeremy, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.