Jason Rook: Scaling Co-Sell with ISVs and Channel Partners

Chip Rodgers   0:00  
Contract. Hey, everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and back again. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna be whispering. We're gonna be doing our golf voices.

Unknown Speaker  0:09  
Yeah, we do have some activity going on behind

Chip Rodgers   0:13  
us. Yeah. So the the event is going on. It's been a fantastic event here in Dallas, ultimate. Partner and what have you. What's been your experience so far? Jason,

Jason Rook  0:23  
well, I think at this ultimate partner, what's been really interesting is the audience has grown a little bit. I'd see some top tier ISVs, use Microsoft lingo, and also kind of a larger pool of what we might call systems integrators, many service providers. So it's just kind of a it's starting to grow. Um, the other thing I've seen is a lot more kind of side meetings where the two of those are getting together and kind of doing some joint business planning. So that's fun to see as well. Yeah, yeah.

Chip Rodgers   0:50  
So that's, that's fantastic. So I'm excited to be joined by Jason rook. Jason is Director of Product Marketing for in the marketplace team for Microsoft. And Jason, your focus is all around, you know, resellers and sort of multi party, bringing multi, multiple parties together to co sell. So tell us a little bit more about what that means. So

Jason Rook  1:16  
my focus is really on cut up we have ISVs that are in our marketplace, that are trying to sell and grow their businesses. But most of those ISVs prefer to sell through some channel partner, right? Most of them have historically only sold through channel partners and then also customers, especially the enterprise space, prefer to buy from those types of partners, right? Whether they're really good at selling that ISV or vendors product, or they're really strong at implementation and support. For either those two reasons, customers gravitate that way. So my focus is on, how do we bring those entities all together to drive more transactions through Microsoft commercial marketplace? And they're really kind of two features that we have that enable that. One is what we call the ISV to CSP, private offer motion, which is which allows a reseller, who's an authorized reseller in our cloud solution provider licensing program, to sell ISV apps into customers. Typically, those are our SMB or SMC segments. And then the, well, I would say the probably the primary motion for us is what we call multi party private offer, which allows a reseller or into any entity really, to sell an ISV zap, into an enterprise level customer, yeah,

Chip Rodgers   2:25  
yeah. That's, that's terrific. So it's interesting, because I think, you know, for a while it's, it's taken a while, I think, to get the market understanding that marketplaces are not necessarily a competitive threat to the reseller, to the channels, right? They really it's an opportunity. It's a way to be working together. Yeah.

Jason Rook  2:49  
I mean, that's really true. I mean, if you think about the analyst data, we're still in the early stages of marketplace adoption, and you know, various analysts, $85 billion in year 2027, and we're on that path. And then you hit some of those same analysts tell you that, you know at least 50% of that's going to go through a channel. We're seeing that already, and it's really early days for us, right? We're multi party, private offers, still only available in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, and channel partners are driving, I would say, both a lot of deals and really big deals a couple weeks ago, we did provide some data that the multi party private offers are two and a half times larger than private offers that don't include a channel partner. So we're and that's kind of a it's amazing. Oh, it's, yeah, it is. But it's not surprising to Microsoft, because that's our business is always run right wherever there's a partner involved. Deals move faster. Deals get bigger. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers   3:41  
that's terrific. Well, you mentioned MPO, and it's been available in the US for about a year, maybe, and little over a year, and then you just launched in the UK and Canada. We you know, thanks for your support. We were a part of the event in London a couple weeks, two or three weeks ago, and yeah,

Jason Rook  4:04  
we were happy to have work span there. I think the work span message that we had on stage was just perfect for that event, because in that event we had almost exactly 50% ISVs, and 50% we'll call them channel partners and large resellers, managed service providers, etc. And the story from work span was really about how we start to bring these entities together and solve some of the difficult pieces of a marketplace deal, right? Marketplace, just like anything else, sounds great, but there are some work you need to do all the way from the front end on kind of pipeline management into the process of where you start to kind of create the offer. You know, traditionally, you would get into kind of the quoting process, that type of thing. Now it's in marketplace. It's really you have to create these offers, and you have to do it in different tools, right? Like Microsoft Partner center is not exactly the easiest place to go navigate. And so the works man message was really a. On how you guys are wrapping around kind of these pieces of complexity and streamlining, streamlining those. And then a minute from work span also kind of started to talk about, hey, wouldn't it be great if you're a channel partner and you can see all the people in the work span ecosystem that have this ability to quickly transact these deals, and I think that was what kind of got a lot of that part of the audience really excited is, hey, there somebody really building something to help us scale as well. So, yeah, that's

Chip Rodgers   5:27  
terrific. Well, it's great to see the success and and, and the the growth of that, you know, of that, of the collaboration, I think, with channel partners, because you're right. I mean, Microsoft is like, it's, you know, always had a huge channel. It's 95%

Jason Rook  5:46  
of all deals are, yeah, and the ID I think we were at this event, we just kind of, I heard him rehash the IDC study that service partners make a little over $8 for every Microsoft deal they're involved with, for every dollar of Microsoft deal they're involved with. And now software companies over 10 and a half dollars for every, you know, Microsoft deal they're associated with. So it's, the numbers are great, right? It's a, there's 500,000 entities in this ecosystem that you can partner with. It's a, it's a great place, you know, not only to build your products as well, but now we can help you take them to market.

Chip Rodgers   6:17  
Yeah, that's terrific. Well, Jason, thank you for anyone that's out there that's, you know, either an ISV or a channel partner that wants to learn more. What's where's a good place to go? Yeah,

Jason Rook  6:28  
so you really the front door for ISVs is what program we call ISV success, and you literally go to microsoft.com/isv and you're registered for the program. And from there, we kind of walk you through a journey. We call it, kind of the build, publish, grow, and then differentiate journey, but it really gets you on platform right? So it's easy for you to develop an Azure with our tool sets and our AI services. Then get you kind of in the right programs, get you transactable in the marketplace, which is the big piece, right? And then, once you're there, help you to grow some of the things, if you're, let's say channel partner. So anybody that wants to sell some software publishers app through marketplace, it's, you just send an email to channel ready@microsoft.com and the concierge service will reach out and help you through the process. I'm sure it's all AI driven for the most part. Yeah, marketplace, they're still really, I mean, it's, we're selling, right? So there's relationships involved, but it is an automated process to some degree.

Chip Rodgers   7:24  
Yeah, that's awesome. Jason, thank you for taking some time and sharing your your thoughts and a lot of great things happening at Microsoft for for ISVs and channel partners. So thank you, beer, Thanks

Jason Rook  7:36  
for Thanks for all the work you guys are doing as well. It's exciting,

Chip Rodgers   7:40  
fantastic. Well, thank you all for joining, and we'll see you. See you next time. Thanks everybody. Orthodox.

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