It was a packed day two of CRN Pipeline 2023 on Queensland's Gold Coast, with more than 150 channel partners and 27 sponsors hearing from distribution, marketing, security, voice and data, end user devices, automation and MSP platform thought leaders, in addition to rounds of golf and poker and exclusive dinners.
Distributors speak out
With many partners having dealt with tricky trading conditions, costs and customer demands over the past year, CRN editor in chief William Maher asked distributors for their view of the way forward.
Crayon’s Vice President of Sales - Tech for Good, Tovia Va'aelua, laid out the opportunity in the not-for-profit sector, which is attracting billions in funding globally to address technology needs.
In New Zealand, Va'aelua said, a large amount of 83 percent of government funding gets pushed to smaller projects “and it’s becoming the same in Australia,” he said. “There are not enough partners to serve those small organisations’ technical needs.”
Va'aelua noted that partners are not necessarily discounting not-for-profit work. He also talked about the opportunity he’s seeing for partners as commercial organisations fund projects in the not-for-profit sector.
He also saw an opportunity for more collaboration in the channel community to address the not-for-profit sector’s needs.
Pax8 VP Communities and Ecosystem APAC, James Bergl, told partners that small and mid-size MSPs needed to specialise to compete.
“We’ve got these conglomerate MSPs coming in, and they’ve got economies of scale, so if you’re not getting a competitive advantage through specialising you’re going to get pushed out on price,” he commented.
“Have a think about the impact on your customers of Covid, security attacks or cyber insurance; your customers are looking at those changes and how MSPs can support them. Pick one of those lanes and go deep at becoming a business expert or a technical expert.”
CRN asked Ingram Micro’s Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive for ANZ, Tim Ament, about the complexity for partners trying to navigate the market. He also pointed to the complexity of many channel transactions.
While cloud has been a major focus at Pipeline, Ament reminded the audience that it remains one half of the challenge.
"It's not just a cloud world, it's not just a physical on-premise world, it's a hybrid world. So how do you make sure that you have solutions and relevancy across both?" he said, pointing to the need for marketplaces that allow for the gamut of transaction types.
Ament also talked about opportunities for partners to expand their businesses. This included MSPs expanding into traditional infrastructure, traditional infrastructure resellers expanding into public cloud and specialised MSPs looking to grow while maintaining a core focus on cloud.
Making business easier for channel SMBs was a focus for Kelly Johnson, Sales Director at Arrow ECS ANZ. She noted that in her view, many partners are dealing with billing and reconciliation headaches.
While some partners bring in a partner to build a platform to manage things, Johnson argued against that approach, in part due to the resources required.
She also touched on the opportunity for partners with suitable platforms for managing this, to offer those platforms to their clients who require self-service.
Dicker Data head of sales for ANZ, Yasser Elgammal, urged partners to evaluate whether their distributor was addressing a range of key issues around recurring revenue, diversification and customer retention.
“Partners should evaluate their distie by asking if are they innovating. Are they identifying new revenue streams? Are they providing me the education and support to grow? Is the distie acquiring enough new resources?” Elgammal commented.
He also pointed to partners’ finance considerations, noting the need for a financer that knows the business and can provide simple, quick approvals.
Fifteen CEO Michael Harte was asked about partners breaking out of traditional offering silos.
“There is a need for partners to stay relevant to the customer. But that can be highly difficult, introducing new technologies, new expertise. And that can be very, very challenging,” Harte noted.
In another sign of how distribution landscape has shifted, Harte explained that Fifteen is tackling this by bringing together its own engineering team and solutions, distribution, and services to augment partners.
Mogifry’s Melanie Unwin on the three common marketing pitfalls in the channel
Co-founder and director of B2B technology marketing firm Mogrify, Melanie Unwin, explained how MSPs can avoid the most common marketing mistakes.
Mogrify’s survey of IT buyers and more than 100 partners identified three big mistakes:
- Failing to communicate the value of a specialist offering to a target customer at the right stage of their buying journey
- Measuring marketing ROI in the short-term instead of the long-term
- Siloing sales and marketing teams
She asked the audience if their team could clearly define their target audiences or put customers into target personas.
“Do we have a segmented database? Did we lose some people by just sending one message too many? Who’s our target market? Is it anyone who needs cybersecurity? That’s too big to be a target."
For MSPs, “coming up with a brand proposition is really challenging because a lot of you do similar things; so it's about just thinking of your value propositions in a bit more detail,” and which niche to focus on.
A lot of partners were vying for all-encompassing managed services agreements, she noted, when in her opinion should be starting with a specialist offering to get a foot in the door.
Once an MSP has proved their value with a specialist offering for a specific problem in a specific industry and made themselves sticky, “then you can cross-sell and upsell really well.”
Another pitfall is measuring marketing ROI in the short term because of “outdated ROI models,” Unwin said.
“Back in the day, you could probably get away with buying lists; blasting it with some messaging; you'd be pushing your services; you definitely wouldn't be personalising the emails; you probably wouldn't be segmenting them; you’d throw everyone into one bucket and ask them ‘this is our solution do you want it?’”
Too many channel partners have been using “traditional models” that focus on “measuring marketing ROI from campaign to campaign,” Unwin said.
“There's an end date; they focus on your use of specific and really easy-to-measure channels.”
Channel partners should pivot to models that measure ROI for “more holistic marketing” that uses “multiple channels” and has “multiple goals” such as “brand awareness, customer retention and customer acquisition,” she said; “this is continuous marketing.”
“If you've spent fair a amount of time tidying up your website or getting some decent market tech in place..the only ROI you're gonna get is if you spend money on using those assets repeatedly over a long period of time.”
A common symptom of the third pitfall - siloing marketing and sales teams - was “using two separate platforms for marketing and sales,” Unwin said.
If marketing just gives sales new leads to put into their CRM, key information will be lost in transit. they need to share insights about what value propositions are resonating with which customers and why.
“It deprives everyone knowledge of what’s actually working and what marketing activity converts to a close and it can pit the two teams against each other as well.”
Breaking the process into two stages, where marketing focuses on nurturing demand through digital channels and then sales use qualified leads to close deals face-to-face, was an outdated model of buying behaviour, Unwin added.
“Customers are buying using their own research and using both digital and in-person channels.”
She said recent research by Deloitte had found that “67 percent of the buyer journey takes place on digital channels,” and that there is a rapid increase in online sales via login portals and marketplace.
Networking, roundtables and dinners
Pipeline attendee also attended breakout sessions included a roundtable on using RMM for automation and cost efficiency hosted by NinjaOne, a workshop on supporting clients with MXDR for 24/7365 security hosted by eSentire, and a workshop by Huntress on how MSSPs can help their customers understand the Essential Eight through the lens of the MSSP’s specialised offerings.
Breakout sessions also included a discussion on evolving voice and data partnership opportunities hosted by Aussie Broadband, a roundtable discussion on the relationship between trust, sustainability and innovation hosted by Fujitsu and a talk on navigating the challenge of multi-functional IT teams by Kaseya.
Attendees also battled it out on the golf course and poker tables before exclusive Swop and nbn-hosted dinners at the Star and OpenText Cybersecurity’s afterparty.
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