THE PARTNER-TO-PARTNER ECOSYSTEM
Cam Wayland: If you look at the skills of a really good salesperson in the IT industry today, they’ve got good business skills, good communication skills, good presentation skills, and they can talk about outcomes and solutions.
If you go back, they were talking about the product? You need some more of this, sign here, buy a car, come back in three years.
The old school guys that were the box movers or whatever, were very target focused and just haven't made it through to continuous selling and the business outcome.
Phil Cameron: The penny dropped for some infrastructure partners who saw their margins declining and started to sell services. And they built partnership ecosystems because they matured and realised they could not do everything.
Ronnie Altit: Partners still struggle to trust other partners. The stories we hear are ‘You said that to him? Only we should talk to them about that.’
There is always going to be conflict between partners.
Steve Martin: One of the interesting things in terms of alliances is what Telstra has done. They flipped so their salespeople get paid on everything that their partners sell. And so now there are some others that are following that model.
Now, as a Telstra partner, you get to leverage their sales team and customer relationships to drive your business growth and the customer gets all the services they need on the one bill. I’ve spoken to some Telstra partners they don’t have a finance department, they just get a check every month.
But there is always risk in generating the majority of your revenue from one source, and so a healthy business should always have diversity in their revenue sources.
THE MSP REVOLUTION
The conversation moved on to consider how partners staff their practices, after Ronnie Altit suggested that salaries for highly-skilled staff are unsustainable.
Karen Drewitt: Karen Drewitt: For very specialist roles, we often bring people in for specific projects. That’s enabled by generational changes in work patterns. Stability or one job is less of an issue and they want their own business. Often they are former employees, we had a great relationship so we hire quite a few of our former employees that way.
That’s enabled by generational changes in work patterns. They don’t need stability. They want their own business. They are former employees, we had a relationship and it ended well. We hire quite a few of our former employees that way.
Phil Cameron: I think that is how a lot of smaller MSPs get started.
Leo Lynch: I know companies servicing SMBs, making big margins. And they do everything for an SMB. The customer doesn't want to know that technology is, they want the outcome.
Steve Martin: Last week I met someone that I was selling to 25 years ago and he’s still doing largely the same thing, delivering IT services to his loyal base of SMB customers. All the tech has changed, but he’s got a group of 50 or 100 customers that he's servicing year on year with very little churn in that small business space that needs someone to trust, someone with IT expertise.
WHERE WILL THE CHANNEL BE IN FIVE YEARS?
Delegates wrapped things up by considering what the channel will look like in five years.
Phil Cameron: Still here!
Tasha Soltonovich: At Ingram we have huge focus on on-boarding independent software vendors to our cloud platform.
If we have 200 vendors, how do we communicate what they do to our Partners? What problem does it solve, and how much recurring revenue does it bring in?
How do we effectively market and sell that?
Simon Sharwood: I know of a SaaS vendor that just does very specific software for insurance companies. Saas makes them global. Local partners mean they can comply with Australian regulations – all that paperwork APRA requires.
I think that’s what we can communicate – that the cloud lets them put their expertise to work.
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