Lori Cornmesser: Building Channel Clarity at 1Password

[00:00:00] Lori Cornmesser: I want my partners to have confidence that I have named them to be, you're the go-to-market partner for the SMB market. And here's why. Or for the enterprise, right? Or whatever that, for the federal business, whatever that may be. Everybody wants to understand the role that they're playing.

[00:00:19] Lori Cornmesser: And the more that I can get everybody on the same page with that, I think that the faster we can go.

[00:00:28] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers with Inside Partnering. We're here in Palo Alto at the El Prado Hotel. And, just, it's been a great event so far today.

[00:00:38] Lori Cornmesser: 100%. It's been so enlightening. Definitely learned a lot about what other vendors, what partners are doing with AI, and certainly left thinking that, there's a ton of opportunity for us to go do for sure.

[00:00:54] Lori Cornmesser: Yeah.

[00:00:55] Chip Rodgers: Yes. Yeah. So much to do, so much happening. Yes. Yeah, 100%. So I'm [00:01:00] so excited to be joined today by Lori Cornmesser. Lori is VP of part of Channels and Alliances with 1Password.

[00:01:07] Chip Rodgers: That's correct. Yeah. Excited to have you on.

[00:01:09] Lori Cornmesser: Thank you. I'm excited to be here and thank you for thinking of me for sure. Yeah.

[00:01:13] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Lori, let's start with just tell us, tell us a little bit about your role and what you and your team are up to.

[00:01:20] Lori Cornmesser: So I joined 1Password about a year ago. 1Password is a password management company.

[00:01:26] Lori Cornmesser: And 1Password is a brand that people recognize, right? Everywhere I go, somebody is saying I'm a 1Password company. And so think about how we're now trying to get into the enterprise, how we're now. Taking that brand into businesses. And so they asked me to come in about a year ago to lay down some pieces around channel partners and alliance partners, and certainly what we're doing with cloud marketplaces.

[00:01:53] Lori Cornmesser: So we have laid down some pretty significant pieces for the company. We're adding growth, we're getting into new [00:02:00] markets that the company had not been, and were introducing new partnerships that they didn't have. We're seeing tremendous growth and we have such a great road ahead of us.

[00:02:11] Chip Rodgers: That's exciting.

[00:02:12] Chip Rodgers: The kinds of partners that you have, are they're channel partners of course, absolutely. Resellers service providers, yes. Also technology providers as well.

[00:02:20] Lori Cornmesser: Technology partners. MSPs are a big part of what we're doing. And distribution for sure. We just use distribution to really leverage our presence in Europe.

[00:02:29] Lori Cornmesser: We're planning to do the same in apac. So yeah, a lot of, we go across the gamut for sure.

[00:02:35] Chip Rodgers: Interesting. A lot of distributors in in Europe and the channel in Europe is very different than the us It's all very it's,

[00:02:41] Lori Cornmesser: it's very different. It requires a different touch.

[00:02:45] Lori Cornmesser: But we're excited about the distributor partners that we have chosen to get us into the main markets and continue to expand with them.

[00:02:54] Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. Yeah. As you mentioned we're here at this, it's a channel [00:03:00] scaler event, and it's been terrific. We heard from CrowdStrike and VMware and Optiv today talking about some of their, what they're thinking, how they're thinking about ai.

[00:03:12] Chip Rodgers: Let's talk a little bit about that. Okay. How are you thinking about AI for for partnerships?

[00:03:18] Lori Cornmesser: I can tell you that I think that my observation today, I would say my greatest takeaway from today is that there still is a lot of confusion around this being hype versus this being put in practice.

[00:03:33] Lori Cornmesser: What I walked away with today is there are vendors that are putting this in practice. There are partners that are using this. There are real use cases that they have about how they're creating efficiencies in their organization, how they're leveraging AI in building greater understanding of their partnerships.

[00:03:55] Lori Cornmesser: It was a call to action for me to really. Stop [00:04:00] thinking about this and really start getting some plays in place. You don't have to solve everything. Day one is what I'm learning, but make a decision to do something. Start from there and scale it is the takeaway that I learned today.

[00:04:13] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, experiment.

[00:04:14] Lori Cornmesser: Yes, that's right. I think what we found is that the use cases were people just getting into experimentation, being curious, getting their company curious and bought in behind that. So it was great. It was a great session for sure.

[00:04:29] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. That's fantastic. So tell me a little bit about the, how you think about technology partners and where are the how do you think about, like going to market together, co building and those kinds of things. Where do those concepts come from

[00:04:44] Lori Cornmesser: and are you saying with AI or just in general? Just

[00:04:47] Chip Rodgers: in general.

[00:04:47] Lori Cornmesser: Yeah, I think so.

[00:04:49] Lori Cornmesser: I think. What we are learning is that keeping things simple, I think we heard, from the panel today is important. That's a core tendency that I've always [00:05:00] had about programs, keeping ease of doing business at the core of what we think about. And also understanding that. The enterprise customer that has become more complex as we're selling into that, right?

[00:05:15] Lori Cornmesser: There's a lot more partners that are in the mix of that enterprise deal. So how do we thoughtfully think about the SI that's involved and maybe the cloud marketplace, team that's involved and the, channel reseller that might be involved. They all are playing a significant role. To close this one deal.

[00:05:36] Lori Cornmesser: Are we being thoughtful about the ways that we're thinking about that? So that was another key takeaway from today.

[00:05:43] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. So you, are you, and you've been with a number of technology companies. What are some of the challenges? What are you seeing today in the market in terms of, distribution resellers, service providers, MSPs?

[00:05:58] Lori Cornmesser: I've had the luxury [00:06:00] of being with larger companies like Juniper Networks and help them scale to 5 billion when I left. And then, smaller companies that are on fast growth. And info

[00:06:11] Chip Rodgers: blocks.

[00:06:11] Lori Cornmesser: Info blocks. That's right. And 1Password is on that path as well. And so they're all at different starting points, right?

[00:06:20] Lori Cornmesser: And so that's, I think one of the things we have to start to remember as well is like our starting point with each of those partner types will be. The roadmap, the playbook for that partner will be different, right? It's not one playbook for all partners. It's what's the playbook for the resellers that are selling into this type of customer and how do we best enable them to go do that?

[00:06:45] Chip Rodgers: And and so the different, and how would you, how do you typically would break that down? Would it be. Geographic, industry solution.

[00:06:56] Lori Cornmesser: People do it differently. I think I always began [00:07:00] with a customer in mind. What customers are we trying to serve? By segment, commercial enterprise, right SMB.

[00:07:07] Lori Cornmesser: SMB, Commercial, Enterprise, and and what partner profile best serves those customers. And then we start to say, great. Who do we have? Who do we need to go get? That helps focus. I'm a strong believer in just making sure my sellers understand what partners they can rely on in those segments.

[00:07:29] Lori Cornmesser: And I want my partners to have confidence that I have named them to be, you're the go-to-market partner for the SMB market. And here's why. Or for the enterprise, right? Or whatever that, for the federal business, whatever that may be. Everybody wants to understand the role that they're playing.

[00:07:48] Lori Cornmesser: And the more that I can get everybody on the same page with that, I think that the faster we can go.

[00:07:55] Chip Rodgers: That's true. I think it's a it can be a challenge to how do you align the [00:08:00] sales team? To get connected to the right, that's right. To the partner, to co-sell and and get those get the team, build that virtual account team to close deals.

[00:08:09] Lori Cornmesser: Yeah. 100%. And I think the other validation that we heard today I don't even know if I should actually say it because it is my little secret weapon, but I'll say it anyway which is, we heard that. Of course we wanna look at partner source revenue. That's of course what you know, the company wants to drive in terms of measure.

[00:08:28] Lori Cornmesser: But we heard from one of the panelists that was coming from a partner that said, there's something in between the transact and the partner sourced, and that's called the assisted. That means if you're already in the account, but yet we wanna bring a partner in because maybe it's stalled or maybe they have a better relationship, then maybe we should still grant them some level of additional discount, beyond transact and below partner sourced to help fund the teaming [00:09:00] part of the equation. They're gonna learn together and that kind of fosters that a bit.

[00:09:06] Chip Rodgers: That's great. I think it is it is getting, bringing everybody together and and creating that the team and using the influence from not only your team, but also the partner.

[00:09:15] Chip Rodgers: That's right.

[00:09:16] Lori Cornmesser: That's 100%. And they all influence each other. You hope that, that start out transacting, then we can start to influence more deals and those lead to partner source. So your measurements start to influence each other. Yeah.

[00:09:30] Chip Rodgers: That's, so you said the magic word measurement. Yes.

[00:09:33] Chip Rodgers: How do you think about measurement? Both, in terms of there's always the question of, influence versus source and all, so how do you think about that?

[00:09:42] Lori Cornmesser: I'm a little bit of a scrappy channel chief, right? I come from a sales DNA, I started my career as an inside salesperson, right?

[00:09:51] Lori Cornmesser: And I was. I was raised in Juniper Networks under high demands of how you get things done. So what matters the most is [00:10:00] revenue. At the end of the day. That's what kind of drives the value for the company. But it's about, are we getting into places that the sellers are not? Are we getting into new logos?

[00:10:11] Lori Cornmesser: Are we. In new markets, right? All those things are important now. There's a ton of things that you have to measure that kind of gets to that, but at the end of the day, the company wants to see how we're transacting, how we're influencing, and how we're driving net new, right?

[00:10:30] Chip Rodgers: Terrific. A salesperson at heart, you've gotta, you've always gotta be thinking about revenue, right? Ultimately that's what it's, I

[00:10:37] Lori Cornmesser: always say to my team everything else is moderately interesting, but that's it. That's it. Keeps us out of trying to defend ourselves every day. It does.

[00:10:47] Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. Lori, this has been really terrific and I really appreciate you taking a few minutes and sharing your thoughts and, thank you.

[00:10:54] Lori Cornmesser: Yeah, thank you so much.

[00:10:57] Chip Rodgers: And thank you all for joining another episode [00:11:00] of inside Partnering and I'm Chip Rodgers and thanks. Thanks again for joining. Thanks, everybody.

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