Doug Balut: Building a 10x Ecosystem at Meltwater

Chip Rodgers   0:00  
Awesome. Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and we're closing out the day here at catalyst. It's been a great couple of days already. How's your event? It's

Doug Balut  0:13  
been great. It's been awesome. Meeting a lot of people, learning a lot, sharing a lot. It's what this is all about. It's been fun. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers   0:19  
yeah. So I am so excited to be joined by Doug ballot, and Doug is with meltwater, Senior Vice President of partnerships and alliances, and doing some amazing things at meltwater. Your career has been just really incredible. Cisco, and then sprinkler and and now with meltwater. So tell I think let's start there. Talk a little bit about that journey and where you know how all he was in partnerships or sales, right? Sales and partnerships, right? Yeah. So tell us about that. Yeah. I'd

Doug Balut  0:53  
love to thank you for asking. I think part of the journey is that I was in direct sales for so long at Cisco, and was doing pretty well. And then some of the execs came over and said, What is this guy doing that his team's growing faster than the company when the heydays. And I said, Well, isn't everybody using the partner ecosystem? And that led to tell me more. Well, you know, when chip from Microsoft is going into Allstate and selling ten million worth of software. I'm going to take them to the Cubs game and have a few beers and talk about how I can clip on some infrastructure to support the internet, and then bring in EMC for storage and VMware for hyper scaler and for for scalability virtual networks. And I'm going isn't everybody doing this and forming an ecosystem, and then we're all growing the same way and and helping who wins ultimately, as a customer. So that led to, please stop what you're doing and pivot and go do that partner role. And I would listen to whatever the CEO John Chambers asked me to do at that time. And so I did that, and I rotated into partnerships, and really loved it. And that was a run. And then I followed John when he left sprinkler, when he left Cisco, went to sprinkler as an investor and a board member, and he asked me to come over there and build out the partner ecosystem, which was really a fix. So it was more like it's working a little bit. We could do a lot better. We need to grow it. How can we repair it? And and that was a seven year journey, and help lead taking them public through that growth. Amazing. Congratulations. Pretty fun there. And then, after a while, I got, I got recruited to go do this same at Mount water, but it's a straight build, so I've been there about 10 months, from a clean whiteboard to putting the ideas and framing it all out and building a team and and having some quick success. It's been a fun run already. That's,

Chip Rodgers   2:41  
that's, that's amazing. That's fantastic. So at meltwater, how are you thinking about the partner ecosystem, you know, from, you know, services to technology partners, cloud part, like, how do you how are you putting those all together? Yeah, that's a

Doug Balut  2:55  
great start. Is that whiteboards like, you know, what kind of partner categories are we going to work with? And it's, you know, depending on your product. For us, it's, you know, a SaaS offering that takes social and media and consumer data, billion pieces of data a day, and run it through artificial intelligence, and you serve it for business purposes. So you look at that and you say, Okay, well, we need agencies and, you know, digital marketing and Insight Analytics. And you take all this data and how does it, you know, how do you translate into meaningful data? Is powerful, but you have to have meaning around it, and insights so agencies as a category and global systems integrators as a category, and Technology Partnerships that want to integrate, and, you know, use our data and add there, whether it's mis and disinformation, or, you know, security, or whatever. The products might be very interesting applications that can go from there and Technology Partnerships, in the cloud partnerships, and, you know, regional boutique partners. So, as you know, chipping, you know, in the in the partnerships group, as long as you have, you need to have these categories, but you don't have to have 1000 partners. You pick the good ones, you enable them, and you build a common business case that says, here's how we're going to approach the customers. We have a tool. We want to sell outcomes. So we have a great platform. It's a great suite of products that does better than our competitors, but stand alone, you know, it's not you need more, right? And you need to sell business value in business outcomes, and all of these partnerships head that way. That's

Chip Rodgers   4:24  
amazing. I love that. And the technology partners, as you're thinking about, you know, built so you've got data, right, but then you've got integrations. How do you think about, you talked about, prioritizing, right? I mean, that's so important. So how do you think about how, what's the, what are some of the criteria you use to prioritize, and are you working with your product teams to Sure,

Doug Balut  4:48  
yeah, product teams are helping with the integrations. We have a very powerful API. And, you know, I'm not on the technical side mentally on that stuff, but I know I have great people around me that can do that. But you know, we'll take our data and. Connect with an API called the extension cord, the magic extension cord, and that'll be a solution that's jointly, jointly created. But all these partner categories have a role in that. Technology is just one of them, right? Agencies sell services and insights and global systems integrators sell business outcomes, and together, you know, it's a powerful combination. The technology is a part of it. We have great tech, super platform, very powerful when you add other ones, whether it's a sports analytics company that we're working with. I don't want to mention names without permissions, but mis and disinformation, sports Analytics, you know, different marketing functions. There's a lot to be said in the combination. And that's what SaaS and subscription software is all about and we learned a lot about that the last couple of days. It's not just a standalone product. It's combining and how you go to market together and always thinking on behalf of the customer and how you add value to increase their business imperatives and

Chip Rodgers   5:54  
when things, when everything's in the cloud, and you've got, you know, public APIs, your magic extension cord, right? It's a whole lot easier, right? It was never possible in the past. On Prem

Doug Balut  6:05  
was challenged back then, cloud partners are strong. We learned about that today, and some of the the presentations and the Q and A's and the technology sessions we did, but having strong partnership cloud partnerships is important too, not just for their vast coverage, and what they do in the cloud, in their marketplaces and all the rest. But to make the transactions easier, make the transactions easier committed spend all the things we learned about. But you know, it's just, it's the combination that overused word of ecosystem. And I don't like one plus one equals three. I like one plus one equals 10. And we learned again today, seven partners on average, in every sizable deal of variety of partnerships. So that's where we're heading. Watch the movie. It's going to be great.

Chip Rodgers   6:50  
Yeah, that's amazing. Well, so Doug, any you've given already, a lot of advice, but anything that you would share because you've been so successful with, you know, as part of and you know, these are partner leaders that might be watching. And anything that you'd share,

Doug Balut  7:07  
I would tell you thank you for the compliment. It's, I'm not successful. My teams are successful. And I think, you know, having buy in from leadership. So two things I say is, you got to have buy in from your leadership, and I do, and you have to, and you got to prove that every day. Here's the plan, here's the vision. We're part of the sales organization. We're here to grow revenue. We're here to make sure we retain customers. But the one thing I say often, and I don't you know, some people call it a dougism, but for the salespeople out there, if you're not partnering, you're competing with those that do. It's it's a fact. So if you're not making the time and planning and orchestrating together with the vast ecosystem of partnerships that are out there, then you're going alone, and lone wolves don't last long.

Chip Rodgers   7:51  
I love that fantastic Doug, thank you so much for taking some time and sharing, sharing your thoughts and your journey and excited to watch what's going to be happening at meltwater. Great.

Doug Balut  8:02  
Good job going ready.

Chip Rodgers   8:03  
Thank you so Doug, thank you, and thank you all for joining and we'll see you next time you.