Matthew Kenneally: Rebuilding a Partner Program from the Ground Up

Chip Rodgers   0:01  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and so here we are at day two at Catalyst, and it's been been a great event, huh? It has

Matt Kenneally  0:11  
been a wonderful event. It's so good to be here in Chicago with all the members of partner leadership at the catalyst event. It's been really amazing.

Chip Rodgers   0:19  
Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Great content, great networking. It's just amazing, and it

Matt Kenneally  0:23  
is. And those are kind of the three things you want to have when you come here. You want to be able to network with people that you haven't met before. I was looking forward to seeing how tall people were, because after you talk to them online, you just you have no idea, and you get surprised by a few people how tall they are. And the second thing, of course, too, is you want to make sure that you're learning something when you're here, no matter how much you know, you always learn something. And the third thing is, you validate that you're doing the right thing, that you know all the hard work that you're putting in to your own partner program, that you're kind of validating that, hey, you know what, all the thing that I'm doing is right and correct.

Chip Rodgers   1:01  
That's, that's, that's really smart. I love that. Yeah, so great. So excited to be joined with Matthew kendi Lee, VP of global alliances and partnerships, right at Van Davo. So welcome Matthew, and we've known each other, sort of, you know, through the years, and you were spent time at SAP and and, and always in the enterprise space, so, and in partnerships, building partner programs. So, so tell us a little bit about where you are right now. What's your been your journey, and what's happening with vendavo.

Matt Kenneally  1:40  
So a little bit about my background. As you said, I was in enterprise sales for half of my career, in carrying a bag, selling software for some great partner, first organizations, Siebel, Oracle, Salesforce, I pivoted about 14 years ago and got involved in channel and alliances. And this is my third company where I'm literally building something from the ground up, one of those companies being SAP, a new line of business customer experience that I helped start, and now I'm here at vndavo and doing the same. Vendavo is an amazing company, 25 year old company. It's the leader in pricing optimization, and we work with manufacturing, wholesale distribution companies, companies that have millions and millions and millions of products and SKUs, and we help make sense of all of those. And we help optimize, you know, an organization's pricing strategy, to optimize their their profitability and their growth, and it's a great market to be in. Then Davos, a 25 year old company, and in the early days, we were a partner, friendly organization. And then when we moved from on demand over to SaaS, and we got a professional services team, guess what we did? We started doing all of the work on our own, and now, you know, we're finally seeing that, hey, we need to have a good balance with a partner ecosystem. So I came on board, and I'm refreshing the whole partner strategy that we have. And it's worked out. It's worked out really well.

Chip Rodgers   3:17  
That's exciting. It's what a great opportunity, right to go, sort of Greenfield, like, let's, let's figure out how we're going to build it. You were just saying that you're, you've put together, or you, you have a three year you put together the three year plan, you're about halfway through it. And things, how are things going? Things

Matt Kenneally  3:34  
are, well, you know, things are never smooth, and there's a lot of hard work. But you know, when I came on board, after assessing where the business was, I put together a three year plan, and I socialized it with all of the groups within the organization, everything from sales to customer success to professional services to marketing to the product team, and making sure everybody was on board with what we wanted to do. And then really came up with great KPIs that we were going to be tracking, that I give to the executive team every month of how we're doing and and, you know, the first year was all about, you know, putting the foundation in. And, I mean, we started from scratch. We started from scratch tore everything down and just rebuilt everything from the ground up, and we saw some great success year one. But year two, we're finally starting to see a lot of great things coming out, partners bringing us into opportunities we never knew about. Partners helping us close opportunities and bringing us over. That's what it's all about. It really is and, and, and it's great that every week you're on a forecast call, and, and it deals either on its way getting close, or has been closed and, and, and now you've got VPS talking about how the partner was was so incredibly important in that journey of getting that done.

Chip Rodgers   4:53  
Well, I love the I love the story, because a couple of things. One is you went to each part. The organization and validated. Like, okay, this is what we're planning. Get their input, get their buy in, number one, and then number two. Now here you are, like the rest of the organization, because they're bought in, they can support, and they get, they understand the value in there, and you're all in it together,

Matt Kenneally  5:17  
yeah, and it's, and it's really important. I think the three things that you need, first of all, is a good plan. Second all, you've got to have good metrics that you've got to measure how successful the plan is. And the third thing is, you have to have executive sponsorship. I have a CEO right now, and an executive leadership team, Chief Revenue Officer and such, that are 100% behind this. They know the only way to really grow the business past the market we have right now is we need a vibrant partner ecosystem, and a little bit different than when I was working at SAP, where we had 10,000 partners in our ecosystem. I'm purposely only having a handful of partners that we're going to market with, but we're having deep, deep, deep relationships with them and building that out. So I'm really going for quality rather than quantity right now, and and it's paying off in a really good way.

Chip Rodgers   6:11  
That's amazing, exciting. Congratulations on that. That's, that's, that's fantastic. And what a sort of turnaround, right? Because, as you said, You told that story, it's like, harder to begin with, but then sort of the organization forgot, or thought, well, let's just do it, you know? And it's like, wait a minute, we're we're missing a whole opportunity here.

Matt Kenneally  6:32  
And you know what? I bet you can talk to 80% of the people here at this conference, and they're all going to tell you the same thing is, is, is, you know, alliances is kind of the ugly, redheaded stepchild that people kind of forget about. And, and then, you know, all of a sudden they realize that, hey, in this market, and this time right now, you know, 89% of all revenue is going through a partner or channel or through an agency somehow. And, and everybody has got to get, got to get involved with that.

Chip Rodgers   7:01  
Fantastic so Matthew, I really appreciate you taking some time and sharing, sharing your thoughts and success along the way, and thanks for stopping by.

Matt Kenneally  7:11  
Thank you so much. Happy to be here,

Chip Rodgers   7:14  
and thank you all for joining and Matthew, thank you, and we'll see you all next time you

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