More Jobs?, iPad Debates and Google Answers the Call

Musings, musings.  Are there more jobs?  Is the economy up or down?  The second question no one knows but everyone has an opinion.  However on the first question there is an interesting new source of information.  Wavelength Market Analytics (http://www.wlanalytics.com/wordpress/) has produced The "Bay Area Tech Job Index".  I will save you from a rehash of their magic formula, the site explains it well.  However, they have cleverly analyzed the data to look for trends in the type of jobs one finds in high tech: product marketing, sales, etc.  They provide a more granular look at the High Tech job trends than one can find in your local newspaper, check it out.  The January index showed a glimmer of hope.

Google is such a wonderful success story that we all forget there are people behind the curtain and they make mistakes.  People who have questions about their phone might get a crazy idea that they could use such a device to get that question answered.  It is a wonder to think that they are surprised that consumer want to talk to humans rather than "googling" for answers.  Certainly they are not the only folks to be shy about providing effect customer support.  At least, Google is responding to the demands of the public.  Beyond Google there seems to be a niche of firms positioning themselves as the place where you can actually speak with humans. What a crazy idea.

Google (NSDQ:GOOG) has quietly added a support phone number for Nexus One, and although the search giant says the number is only for inquiries about phone shipments, it suggests Google is taking seriously the numerous customer support complaints that have dogged Nexus One since its early January debut.

Walt Mossberg, Charlie Rose, et all debate virtues of the iPad.  Interesting stuff, but enough already until there is a product to actually review.

SaaS Profits for the Channel, Why is it Always About Money?

Once again, Mike Allers joins the discussion.  He has been on the front lines in bringing SaaS to the channel both introducing SaaS to an established VAR channel as well as developing an existing SaaS channel.  

As many vendors struggle to work a SaaS offering into their portfolio, many are overlooking a key part to that strategy...how does the Channel Community stay profitable in that equation?

Honestly, there isn’t a silver-bullet, so get that out of your head right now. The first thing to understand is that BOTH vendor AND partner will have to adjust. 

Out of the gate, the responsibility will fall on the vendor to take initial steps to create a Channel-friendly offering. What does that mean? First and foremost, when developing the solution make certain to create multi-tiered management capabilities. This means that there needs to be the ability for the customer, partner and vendor to access and add, remove, and manage via a web-based portal.

Vendors will also have to set up a few SaaS go-to-market scenarios for the Channel Community. There should be options to allow the partner to resell the vendor solution as well as to private label the offering under their own or a generic name. Ultimately, this opens the door for the Channel Community to pool together several SaaS offerings from multiple vendors to create specific solutions tailored to each market segment or customer type and let’s them decide how to package it.

The Channel Community will have a few things to pick up as well. It means that the days of only reaching out to customers to every quarter just to see what you can sell them are over. Partners will have to remain in constant contact with customers, staying in tune with day to day activities of the customer. They will need to beef up technical staff to not only include engineers for design, implementation and troubleshooting, but will need administrative technical staff as well to manage the portals. As the Channel Community begins to add multiple SaaS offerings from multiple vendors, they will need to consider what options they need for a front-end portal to manage everything. 

Also, a very clear communication path will be absolutely necessary! Without it, you will be fighting over customers and not even know it. This means that things like deal registration and rules of engagement must be clearly defined and vehemently adhered to.

Rolling out a SaaS offering to the Channel won’t happen overnight and what works for one vendor won’t necessarily work for another. If you spend the time to understand your business and your partners, you can make a very successful SaaS Channel Program. This may be your chance to break away from the peloton and lead the pack...

You can follow Mike on twitter, at MikeAllers

I am a supporter or the iPad, but this video is pretty funny I must admit.

It's coming!! IPad

Just because....we need yet another iPad review.  Whether you like it or not Apple has created yet another device that doesn't easily fit established categories.  The historical IT approach is to ignore it until the users create a stink or simply start using the device in great numbers.  Remember the iPhone, lots of pundits said that it was not enterprise ready.  Well there are 2 million units purchased by enterprises and an additional 5 million that users have put in use in the enterprise.

It is not a PC (or Mac), true.  However, much of what we "knowledge" workers do is consume information and this is a great device for consuming while being mobile.  It is an enabler for mobile access to "your" cloud.  Think about doctors, during each visit they consume information about your heath history in far greater volume than they create about you.  

The iPad conceivably could be enticing to enterprise IT. This isn't a huge leap; the vast majority of personal computers are lap tops.  Heck there was much conversation about tablet PC's, many enterprise's were abuzz with the idea of a computer that could be used like a clipboard, more conveniently in the course of normal business. Alas, the tablet PC was still too clunky to fill the role envisioned everywhere from doctor's offices to factory floors, but the iPad, with it's speed, form factor, and intuitive interface might not be. Is it more suited to business than consumers?  

Well, there are rumors that the folks at Apple have a few business features that will emerge over the next few months.  But before that, think about the iWork application.  While they gave it a multitouch upgrade, it is still an Office-compatible productivity suite.  In the fine print, you can learn that it is a nice presentation tool, it supports VGA output for driving a projector, users can market up slides and point with a virtual laser pointer during the presentation.  The rumors say that there will be direct printing network printing iPad applications and support for dealing with a local file server

For the reseller or vendor, this signals a need to get ahead of the curve on iPads.  Get ready and become the expert for your customers.  Help them in assessing their business uses before users start bringing them in.  Whether you are a reseller, software developer or SaaS provider.  Enterprises will need to support them and as important secure them.  I can see the headlines now, as an iPad "walks away" with a million social security numbers on the disk.  Save your customer, help the CIO's drive their bus, they may get to keep some control if they get ahead of their users. Otherwise there may not be a seat. 

Time for my pet peeves:

     1) Why does my iPhone change "iPad" to "Olaf", did Microsoft slip code into the iPhone as a joke?

     2) Of the many iPad comments, the jokes have been pretty funny, but one pundit went all politically correct and argued that the name "iPad" showed that there weren't enough women in high tech.  I guess she never used a "pad" of paper.  I am waiting for someone to complain that it is code for corporal punishment for kids, iPad(dle) and file suit.

Money, Money, Money

With a view from the front lines, Mike Allers a channel veteran agreed to talk about compensation plans and the channel.  Mike has been a force in the channel at SurfControl, Websense, Nokia, he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly in this business, without further delay here is Mike:

One of the biggest issues I’ve seen in today’s Channel Organizations appears to be setting up a compensation plan that creates a win/win for both the organization and the Channel Team. Many executives tend to focus on the direct relationship between the cost of the sales personnel and the cost of the sale. While I agree that this remains to be one of the most effective methods, I don’t believe that most executives truly understand what the cost of the sale is for a Channel Team. Not only does the cost of the sale have different metrics, it has vastly different timeframes to contend with as well.  As an example, Channel Professionals spend their time developing business relationships and creating business plans then executing on those plans. These can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months to begin to produce. It’s not a matter of stepping into a partners office and demanding purchase orders. It’s about creating a positive business relationship, and those don’t happen overnight.

Depending on how your sales team is structured, in most Channel Sales models the reality is that the Channel Account Manager (CAM) doesn’t have the ability to directly affect their own income. They count on internal sales staff as well as Partner sales staff who are often compensated on their own set of goals.

The CAM will need a little more stability and less upside potential. As a general guideline, a CAM’s compensation should be about at a 60% base and 40% variable that includes revenue and Management by Objectives (MBO). It’s imperative that a good portion of the CAM’s variable pay is MBO’s that involve activities like marketing and lead development. MBO’s should include things like: number of marketing events/activities, number of leads, number of opportunities, weekly reports, regional team meetings, Partner business plans, number of Partner acquisitions, percentage of Partner growth, etc. All of these are ways to increase visibility, increase Partner awareness and indirectly increase revenue while allowing the CAM have a bit of control of their destiny. 

On the other end of this, is how do you create a compensation plan that is “Channel neutral” (assuming you have both direct and indirect sales staff)? This can be a long and drawn out debate, but some key factors to consider are: direct vs. indirect true cost of a sale, percentage of business that is direct vs. indirect and the potential conflict of a compensation plan weighted too heavily in either direction. If your direct staff is paid on the gross value of the sale (which they probably are), do a little research to compare how the deviation from list price fares against an indirect sale thru a Channel Partner...you may be surprised to see that you actually do better thru the Channel. 

And think about some of the other benefits of having a unified field-sales team. Channel Partners absolutely despise Channel conflict and just as you would want them, they would rather be working to find opportunities and closing them. Every time there is conflict, not only does your CAM have to manage it, but someone from the Channel Partner has to take time away from selling to manage that conflict as well.

Gifts All Around

Happy Holidays all.  In the spirit of giving the topic today is .... (Drum Roll) ...Free stuff!!!  Okay, okay, there is a "horn a plenty" of free today.  How about this?  Useful free stuff for the partner ecosystem. 

I recently attended a conference that was truly packed with great info, interesting people and generally was worth the entry fee.  On the last afternoon, 4 hours listening to a wonderful speaker, Susan Sweeney educate the room on different aspects of internet marketing.  One of the sessions Susan lead was devoted to Great Internet Tools and Gadgets.  It provided me the inspiration to sort through internet tools and highlight the ones that I think have the greatest leverage in the partnering business.  I encourage you to visit Susan's site an even broader list of gadgets as well as her books and services.

In addition to Susan's talk and my experience, I surveyed colleagues and business partners to assemble the master list.  A couple of notes.  First, programs like Facebook and LinkedIn that we discussed earlier are not included and secondly this is a much edited list.

MailChimp  These folks offer free mailings for lists under 500 addresses.  The tools to create nice looking email are on the site.  They have a huge library of videos and FAQs to help you run a successful campaign and a dashboard so that you can monitor the progress.  Who doesn't need more SPAM?

Content Circles  Share files with partners outside or inside the firewall at the drop of a hat.  Content Circles allow you to work with together on documents and everyone is kept up to date with the latest version. Think about working on a coop marketing program or trying to get coordinated for a multi-company seminar or sharing working documents with clients during a consulting engagement.  Document management for the rest of us.

Knowem  This site checks a long list of web sites and social media services for your company's name and allows you to reserve it. This is a huge time saver and maybe helps you to check sites that your staff would not get to.

The Way Back Machine  Kind of an interesting notion, you can go back and check versions of web sites.  Maybe you are looking for historical information on a competitor or trying to remember who the old sales VP was for a partner.

Issuu  Very interesting site, PDF can be cumbersome on the web, especially for rich documents.  Well, Issuu will take a PDF document and turn it into a web friendly Flash file.  There are thumbnails to flip through, pages to flip like a book or pamphlet.  Make your price book or parts catalog sexy.

Google Analytics  This is the tool everyone should be using with your web site.  Got to pay attention to the site, but why pay cash to do so.  This should be more than enough for any small or medium sized business.

Free Conference Call  Don't pay for con calls, ATT is big enough.  Signup here and hold your staff meeting with your traveling staff for free.

Enjoy.

Don't Let Complexity Scare You.

"My product is too complex for the channel"!  Have you heard that before?  Sometimes is used as a catch all statement to justify a direct only sales approach to the board, other times it means that the product truly is hard to set up or sell.  Do you buy the argument?  If so you will miss out on sales, but don't worry the competition will handle it.

"I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface."

~Jaron Lanier, (Lanier is best known for his work in Virtual Reality)

In many cases I think that Jaron is right, really clever products have wonderfully simple interfaces, iPod comes quickly to mind.  However as you peel back the onion, complex products fall into one of three camps:

     1)  The Productoid - this product that escapes rather than is finished.  Charitably it can be called a tool kit.  Whatever term you want to use, it is a lump of code that requires lots of labor to make it work, likely is a challenge to work with as the API's if they exist are poorly documented.  The best outcome for this type of product in the channel is to uncover sales leads.  If the product is refined, and polished perhaps more can come from channel partners.  Typically what happens is that the product gets a bad name among channel partners and the vendor returns the feeling saying that the channel provides no value.  The one thing everyone agrees is that the foray into the channel was a failure.

     2)  Integration Nation - This product is in the middle of a number of different systems and must be integrated with each of them.  The skills required are an experienced computer scientist with broad experience, ie they will have implemented many different products.  With an organized approach an army of skilled implementers can be developed from resellers and systems integrators.  As long as the customer sees the advantage of the product, you can succeed in the channel.  This integration challenge is typical in the High-Tech world so firm's can expect to get distribution and implementation leverage.

     3)  The McKinsey Effect - The last category is the product that requires a ton of business process knowledge, either about a particular type of an industry or a functional area.  Examples are Cerner Corporation with it's Health Care Information System a cheerful customer requires this CRM be implemented by people familiar with hospitals, content management software for building and maintaining web sites require companies to establish black and white  procedures for making changes, i.e. who approves what changes or by what processes are changes approved - the functions of the software are easy compared with guiding a company to establish formal procedures which may change the behavior of their employees.  This type of software requires a business analyst rather than a technologist. 

The first step is to carefully decide on your target channel partners, always important it is critical with complex products.  A pharmacy automation tool in the hands of a catalog reseller is a "match made in heck".   For integration challenges, find resellers with experience implementing some of the applications to be integrated with.  They will have to some direct experience and the foundational knowledge to succeed.  In addition, the company will be open to talking with you as they understand the business potential.  

A business process product will do better in the hands of a  reseller from that industry who can speak the language and understand the customer's business.  They can be hard to find and harder to engage in a conversation as many times they have a singular focus.  However once your firm gets their attention the value proposition can be a nice match as you have a new product or service for their existing customers.

Okay you have a identified the right profile resellers, what next?  Determine what you want from the channel, drive the organization to be realistic.  Complex products are slow going, so plan to stay for the full journey.  A word of caution, sometimes the need is so great for the product that there is a bow wave of interest and sales which generates excitement but then the implementation challenges slow the process and dampen the excitement as well as sales.  Keep you finger on the pulse of the channel so you aren't surprised.    Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a recent case of the trend, it is not clear if DLP has yet recovered.  

Leads, leads, leads is what you are going to get initially from the channel and if you do be happy.  Qualified leads cost your marketing department $350 to $750 each.  Focus your attention, program and energies here.  What that means is that your company is going to do the heavy lifting with the product.  So your training goal is to provide a concise knowledge of the product to both technical and business folks at the reseller but then your team will focus on teaching the resellers how to uncover a need and mechanics of a sale, i.e. who is typically the decision maker, who do you initially approach with the value proposition, etc.  The key deliverable from the vendor is a clear explanation of the need for the product and who cares about the problem being solved.  With each sale by a reseller you transfer more knowledge, pretty soon that reseller will take control of more and more of the sales process.  

Once you have the "front end" the process tight then you can move to technical certifications and leveraging the technical resources of the reseller.  One of the classic mistakes is for an organization to fixate on getting technical leverage first, not going to happen until there is a business case.  Steer your organization away from this pitfall, set the expectations of sales first.  When you start the technology transfer phase, be careful not to scare the resellers away by making the coursework too long.  Segment the training into bit sized pieces, maybe teach how to install and configure first if your product is a real "bear" work with.  That all said you should pitch the opportunity for services revenue to the reseller, if only to set the expectations for the future.

Never fear complex product can be sold successfully with partners, you don't have to go it alone.

Not Just for Kids

First things first, thanks to all of the comments and thoughts that people sent about the first Blog.  A quick reminder that my focus in this Blog is partnering, and how to be more successful in this endeavor.  A broad review of social media is not part of my aim.  

Now to business, what does one do with this new found knowledge about social media.  The answer is lots of things, customer support and brand building are two of the most popular, however we are going to concern ourselves here what you can do to enhance the partner business, starting with the partner portal.

If you jump into the old time machine. remember the promise of Partner Portals.  Private secure islands in the wonderful world of the web.  They promised to replace binders, monthly mailers, banks of people on the phone.  Partners could get product information 24x7.  We all spent tons (“tons” is a technical term meaning way more than planned) money on our portals.  Then they grew from informational to active with deal registration, participate in contests, lead distribution, certification, yada, yada.

What happened?  They didn’t get used to the degree envisioned or by the people and partners we most wanted.  Partner portals are a good but not great tool.  The fatal flaw in my experience....too many.  Every vendor and each distributor developed one (sometimes more than one) and it overwhelmed the individual.  A mid sized VAR has 100 to 150 product lines which means for each sales person has an overwhelming number of passwords, all with different formats.  They can end up largely private library’s with few visitors. 

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

George Bernard Shaw

What to do?  Let Facebook or LinkedIn (or your favorite) host your portal and leverage their existing community, make it easy for individuals to use.  There are 250 million people with Facebook accounts, 45 million at LinkedIn, many partner employees will have existing accounts.  Any that don’t have accounts certainly have heard about the services and are likely to be open to joining.  This goes a long way toward solving the access challenge.  Monthly operating cost = 0.  

After you have set up an account for your business, next steps: populate with relevant content, invite individuals at partners, encourage questions and comments to establish a community, make announcements, keep the content relevant.  You are striving for active participation, relevance, a true Web 2.0 portal, not a yesterday’s web portal, which means that your team must be actively involved in the conversations.  To stay relevant you must answer the questions, deal with the controversial issues out in the open.  The process will allow greater transparency with your partners and help build trust, but it may be uncomfortable dealing with issues in the open, be ready.  Both LinkedIn and Facebook have security setting that will help you manage access, it appears to me that Facebook’s settings may be the better fit for this model.  

The next step is to leverage the API’s or interfaces provided by these platforms.  You can use the API’s to write applets to do deal registration, or manage coop funds or integrate into exiting applications.  LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications platform is designed to get LinkedIn into your applications and the ability to get your applications into LinkedIn.  LinkedIn and others support Google’s OpenSocial set of API’s which promise more options.  Facebook started out open and extendable, heck there is even a “Building Facebook Applications for Dummies” book.  An ancillary benefit of the platforms is that they are already encompass the mobile user. 

After all this, get it used. Recruit your most engaged partners to use the platform, to start conversations, to tell other partners how cool and useful your partner “portal” is, get on the phone with editors to tell them what you are doing, give speeches about your creation, publicize successes, create a buzz.

There is an elephant in the room...Advertising.  Yes you will have to put up with advertising (not on the mobile side, today) but it is a small price to pay to leverage existing communities to ease the communications burden with your partners, build communities around your business at a fraction of the cost with easier access for your constituents than a “DIY”(Do It Yourself) portal.  Leveraging the technology is great however the true cost is building the community and these services give you a “leg up”.

Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research. “Extending useful business applications on top of existing business communities will bring a new opportunity for efficiency — business communities will be more productive.”

Become 3-dimensional in your partner interaction with Web 2.0.  Leverage the platforms and existing communities, build an applet to extend the platform if you need to, but concentrate your effort on keeping to the message fresh, establishing a dialog and electronically reaching out to your partners.