Balaji Subramanian: The Four Ps of Partner AI Success

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[00:00:00] Balaji Subramanian: And one of the thing that, we should point out, always remind people, and we talked about this today at this event, was just the governance of your strategy is very important.

[00:00:10] Balaji Subramanian: And then the data integrity, the quality of your data is very important. So pay attention to those two things when you start out any type of AI program. Is data quality and governance.

[00:00:27] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers with Inside Partnering, and we are here in Palo Alto at the El PRADO Hotel. El

[00:00:34] Balaji Subramanian: PRADO Hotel. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:00:37] Chip Rodgers: Terrific venue. And got a bunch of folks here

[00:00:39] Balaji Subramanian: from, for the for our event. Yeah.

[00:00:42] Chip Rodgers: Channelscaler event, which was fantastic. All about AI and partnerships and, it's been a great day.

[00:00:47] Balaji Subramanian: Yeah. No, it has been. We've had a very lively attendance, as you can see in the back, we had about 80 people or so who attended, and the theme of the event was, how do you [00:01:00] use AI in the near term future of partnerships as well as long term future of partnerships?

[00:01:06] Balaji Subramanian: And we had customers come in, we had three customers one from CrowdStrike. One from Optiv and one from Broadcom, and because that's when it makes it more real, right? When you actually have customers coming in. Talking about what they're doing, how they're using technology, how they're changing processes and policies and systems, and makes it more real for our attendees as well.

[00:01:30] Balaji Subramanian: Yeah,

[00:01:31] Chip Rodgers: that's fantastic. So I'm so excited. First here we are just chatting away. So excited to be joined by Balaji Subramanian and Balaji as Chief Partner Officer for Channelscaler. And gosh, we've known each other for quite a while now. And your background is in partnerships with you were with Zuora most recently before Channelscaler and IGEL Informatica, adobe. [00:02:00] Adobe, and Cisco many years. You've been doing the partner thing for a while,

[00:02:04] Balaji Subramanian: right? Yeah, I've been fortunate, first of all to work with bunch of great companies. I've learned a lot over the years, different industries, different markets, different customer segments and certainly working with partners is what I found to be my sweet spot, right?

[00:02:20] Balaji Subramanian: I really love working with people. I really love solving, for business outcomes and working through partners and helping them. Actually brings a lot of satisfaction for me. So it's been very nice. Yeah,

[00:02:32] Chip Rodgers: it's, it's a tough job, but it is fun. You get to, you solve some really interesting challenges and you are working with people and trying to figure out how to put everybody together.

[00:02:41] Balaji Subramanian: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's you're the hub. You become the hub, right? Between your product teams, your finance teams, your sales teams, and then partners, right? Your marketing teams, you become a nice hub and create that flywheel effect that people talk about. That's what's most satisfying and [00:03:00] gratifying.

[00:03:01] Chip Rodgers: And the, what you just described, I've heard, the partner role, people have say, which is true, you're like a general manager of your own business or a CEO, right? You have to work with so many different, all parts of the, your, not only your business, but also the partner's business.

[00:03:18] Balaji Subramanian: Absolutely. That's so important. I'm glad you brought that up Chip is that role, right? That persona is really a general manager role because to be successful you need to be able to work with all your stakeholders across the company as well as third party people like our partners. And luckily for me, my career, I started out in finance and so I had that background, which has helped me.

[00:03:43] Balaji Subramanian: Every day through my whole career, which I'm so grateful for again. Yeah.

[00:03:48] Chip Rodgers: So tell us a little bit about Balaji, about your team. What you're up to these days at Channel, Channelscaler.

[00:03:55] Balaji Subramanian: Yeah. As Chief Partner Officer for as Channelscaler we wanna do the same thing [00:04:00] as many of you wanna do, right?

[00:04:02] Balaji Subramanian: We wanna build a partner strategy. We wanna build a partner program that aligns with our partner type. And be able to make them successful. So we're successful. And of course we wanna acquire new logos, we wanna expand our install base, right? And have both of us make money. And so that's really what we wanna do.

[00:04:22] Balaji Subramanian: And of course, the most important thing is making sure that our customers are happy and satisfied. Yeah.

[00:04:29] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. You just mentioned the things, the, a couple of things that are so important, right? It's it is about revenue. Yeah. And it's about cust driving customer value.

[00:04:39] Balaji Subramanian: Yes, absolutely. If you don't drive customer value, you lose relevance very quickly.

[00:04:44] Balaji Subramanian: And it becomes very ad hoc. So always focus on, on, on customer value and making them successful, and then life becomes really good. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:04:55] Chip Rodgers: it's fantastic. So the theme today was AI and partnerships. [00:05:00] Balaji, tell us a little bit about as you mentioned, just a great panel, a really good discussion kicked off by Margaret Adam, who's just terrific.

[00:05:08] Chip Rodgers: We've known her many years, going back to her days as an analyst at IDC. And yeah tell us a little bit about what we heard today about AI and partnering.

[00:05:19] Balaji Subramanian: Yeah, so my colleague, my teammate, Margaret. Talked about the four Ps, so it's easy to remember, right? It's obviously P for partners, but then p for program.

[00:05:30] Balaji Subramanian: So you gotta build a program that is build to act right, that you can use, it's effective. And then of course people are so important. That's how you get things done, right? So if you empower people, train them and make sure that they're successful, that becomes really relevant and important. And then of course PRM, right?

[00:05:50] Balaji Subramanian: Channelscaler provides that part tech, the technology all around partners, right? And so if you combine those four Ps you have a nice framework [00:06:00] that you can use to drive success. And that's what we started hearing from our customers. So we had CrowdStrike join us. We had Broadcom join us. We had Optiv join us.

[00:06:10] Balaji Subramanian: So three customers, and they talked about how AI. And how AI baked into our platform Channelscaler platform have made them successful in a number of things. And they gave some really cool examples, which I think you guys will like. One of course was deal registration. So one of our customers said, you know what?

[00:06:30] Balaji Subramanian: We had a six part process that a partner had to go through from a deal reg standpoint. We were able to automate four of those, so 70%. Of that process was automated, made it much more easier for partners now to be able to come in and register deals. And that allows then, what is that allowed to do?

[00:06:49] Balaji Subramanian: Conversion becomes faster, quicker, you accelerate revenue. These are all the things that we care about. Another example was around MDF, right? And I think I was telling Chip [00:07:00] this earlier, that, we all have managed millions of dollars of MDF over the years, right? And what's the process?

[00:07:06] Balaji Subramanian: Oh my gosh. You get a proposal from a partner, you have to read through it. You have to maybe have three levels of approval. Then you what do you do? Then you let them go off and do it. Then they come back and submit a performance stuff on it. Then you have to review that. Then you gotta approve it.

[00:07:22] Balaji Subramanian: Then you gotta pay them, right? Lots of steps in an MDF process. Yeah. Yeah. So you know what? Building an MDF agent, like we've done, it's allowed our customers in this case. To be able to use that and cut down the cycle time and cut down the friction involved in that particular process, making it much more meaningful for our partners to be able to use MDF in a much more effective manner.

[00:07:47] Balaji Subramanian: So two great examples. I'll give you another example. We heard lead distribution, right? We all give leads to our partners. How do we do that? Sometimes it's very ad hoc chip, right? And so now with AI,

[00:07:59] Chip Rodgers: and the [00:08:00] last thing you want is so to send leads out and then have them sit there, right?

[00:08:05] Balaji Subramanian: Happens a lot, right?

[00:08:06] Balaji Subramanian: And so what do you wanna do? So we use now an agent that allows us to be able to understand the partner, the best partner fit, right? What industry are they in? What customer segment? What competencies do they have? What skills do they have? What are their former customers that they've acquired and say, that's the perfect fit.

[00:08:27] Balaji Subramanian: Here's the lead. Go off and do it. Boom. They can take it. They can run with it. Again, conversion factors acceleration to revenue, all of that becomes so much better, and that's what we care about, right? So ease of doing business is so important, right? Your partners get up and think about seven to eight other partners that they work with.

[00:08:47] Balaji Subramanian: You want them waking up, thinking about you. And because you're easy to do business with. So these kinds of things that we're putting into our platform helps customers like CrowdStrike, Broadcom, Optiv, make their lives [00:09:00] easier and their partner lives easier as well.

[00:09:02] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, it's terrific. That's that.

[00:09:04] Chip Rodgers: It's there's so much happening with AI these days that and it's happening so, so quickly that, everyone's coming out with new. New solutions and everything that it's it's just, this is just the beginning of the road.

[00:09:14] Balaji Subramanian: It is the beginning. And one of the thing that, we should point out, always remind people, and we talked about this today at this event, was just the governance of your strategy is very important.

[00:09:26] Balaji Subramanian: And then the data integrity, the quality of your data is very important. So pay attention to those two things when you start out any type of AI program. Is data quality and governance. Start small, do a pilot and then keep going. And we are here to help you. So yeah.

[00:09:44] Chip Rodgers: Terrific. That's fantastic. Gosh, what's what's next?

[00:09:48] Chip Rodgers: What's coming next for Channelscaler? You've had some. Interesting changes, new CEO. And and Kenneth is awesome. He's taking on the CTO role founder and so what's [00:10:00] next for channels?

[00:10:00] Balaji Subramanian: Yeah, no you said it right. Our Kenneth Fox our CEO and founder, he's now becoming our CTO.

[00:10:06] Balaji Subramanian: So he is gonna run all engineering, all product, all customer success, half the company and make sure that runs well, because that's so important. We're so focused on our customers and our business outcomes. And then we're poising ourselves for our, we're putting ourselves together as a as an organization that is poised to continue to grow and be successful as we go forward.

[00:10:30] Balaji Subramanian: So we have a new CEO. We have a new CFO. We're having a new VP of sales hiring a new VP of marketing. And I'm now gonna focus primarily just on partnership. And those types of partners that are super important to us, we wanna be able to enable properly and make them successful.

[00:10:47] Balaji Subramanian: If they're successful, we're gonna be successful.

[00:10:50] Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. Paul, thank you for taking some time and sharing your thoughts. It's been a great day and and thanks for having me here and for taking some time to chat. [00:11:00] Yeah.

[00:11:00] Balaji Subramanian: Thank you, Chip. It's been great to have you here and we always appreciate your partnership too.

[00:11:05] Balaji Subramanian: So thank you guys.

[00:11:06] Chip Rodgers: Yep. Thank you all for joining and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody.

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