Click to Read Full Transcript
Austin (00:07.202)
Hey Rick, good to see you.
Austin (00:36.654)
Oh, thanks, Rick. Hey, I'm Austin Birmingham. I am the Americas Partner Marketing Manager Team Lead here at Atlassian. I've been here at Atlassian for a little over 10 years now and really have seen a lot of growth within the partner marketing organization over those last 10 years that I've been able to help grow this side of the business.
Austin (01:07.234)
You know, it's partner marketing had just been formed here at Atlassian when I had joined. I came to work for Atlassian because Atlassian had just adopted Elastic Grid as their through partner marketing automation solution, giving partners a way for them to take email templates and social media posts and them out
Austin (01:37.518)
And so was my job in the early days to show these partners how to use the platform and you get them sending out emails to their customers and inviting them to learn more about our solutions and our products.
Austin (02:03.468)
Yeah, for sure. You know, it's interesting, Rick, is that you starting here, we had a big focus on email automation, like I just mentioned. But at the same time, we also had a really big focus on running just really big events with our partners. And when I say that, like I'm not talking about big trade shows, but we're running large
in-person events with our partners where they're trying to feel like a movie theater with a hundred people, really like targeting every user at the customer company to try to get them to these events. And, you know, if we ever had like less than 50 people, we were in panic mode because we're trying to get like, you know, like I said, a hundred people to these events. it's, it's interesting how that's changed because we just don't really see that anymore.
Austin (03:17.974)
Yeah, you we had some partners who had built some muscle around live webinars, but not everyone. And so one interesting thing that we did is we were able to use the Atlassian Zoom account to set up a child accounts for our partners. So a lot of our partners for a little while there got free Zoom accounts so that we can kind of help them transition into the digital world.
And a lot of our partners became really successful at those webinars. And we've seen a few webinars where we've had hundreds of people attend. Not so much anymore. I would say it's interesting because as time has gone on, we've really kind of dialed in on the target titles that we want. Really going after decision makers.
And now we have some partners that are targeting specific industries that they want to go after. So we're really narrowing down our ideal customer profile for a lot of these partners and events and webinars are getting a lot smaller, but a lot targeted. And I love to see that because as we're doing these more executive roundtable type events now, if we're doing something focused on
say insurance, the partner can invite an existing customer that they've been working with for a long time and have that customer tell these prospective customers their story of what it's been like working with the partner and adopting the Atlassian solution that they're discussing that day into their ecosystem. And that's what's really going to resonate with these customers. When they can hear it from another customer that's lived through it and have the experience,
and they share the same challenges, that's really going to resonate.
Austin (05:34.072)
Well, really I think it's been the most successful partners are able to do both because we're in a remote work environment now where you may have Microsoft headquartered in Seattle, but they have employees all over the country. So the webinars are a fantastic way to find those people wherever they may be. And an interesting stat that we've seen is that
80 % of customers are attending the webinar before they decide to make purchase. So it really is a platform where people are able to casually come in, ask some fact-finding questions to really see if this is a solution that they want to pursue. So I would consider webinars to be like a middle of funnel tool for us. And then we see these executive round tables as a bottom of funnel activity where
If we have maybe a customer or a handful of customers that we really want to convert, we're going to find out where they are and go to them and host the roundtable there and do this event specifically for them and the sales team that is trying to close the deal.
Austin (07:20.43)
you know, I mentioned getting those customer speakers into the round tables is so important. it's interesting, like you think it would be easier to get a customer to come on a webinar and participate in a presentation than it would be to get them to a live event. But we actually find it to be a little bit of the opposite. And some of the red tape is that customers are not able to have something recorded that can be in existence forever.
because then legal teams have to worry about how that content is maybe going to age over time. But we find it to be a little bit easier to get those customers on site and have them speak to the customers live if it's not recorded. So that's kind of an interesting nuance that we found in doing this. But on the reverse, in terms of the ease of getting a webinar together, you can get it put together and record it ahead of time.
and maybe do like a live Q &A at the end, allowing you to do edits to the session before it gets produced and shared with customers. So there's certainly some advantages there. And the webinars we're doing with our partners are such extremely low cost. I mean, really, it's just an investment of time on the partner side to make those happen. And with enough promotional runway, we're finding them to be really successful still.
Austin (09:01.134)
You know, it always seems to be like legal and PR seem to be the roadblocks when it comes to doing a webinar. But it seems like if we're just like inviting them out to this event and we are in most cases offering to pay for their travel, which helps grease the wheels to make things happen. then I think that the person can be a little bit more motivated to get their company to approve it if we're doing that. And
Yeah, that's some of the hurdles that we've been able to overcome. And what's interesting is our partners are typically more successful at getting customers to come speak over Atlassian. And I think it's because our partners have really invested the time to build these relationships with the customers and they're able to lean on them and say like, hey, like we could really use your help here. Can you please come tell your story?
Austin (10:49.89)
unique experiences, Rick. we've been doing really a wide variety of things. one coming up here in a couple of weeks that I'm really excited about. We've got a partner who has rented the Porsche racetrack in Atlanta. they have 17 cars ready for us, where we're going to be doing like a, a lunch, with a customer presentation. And then the.
Customers are gonna go out and drive Porsches around the racetrack for a couple hours. I wish I was gonna be there because that's gonna be just a really unforgettable event on a Friday afternoon. But that's not the only one. We just funded a San Francisco Giants game. We funded some NFL suites recently. We've got an event coming up.
in about a week for the US Open Tennis Tournament happening in Miami. So we've been getting pretty creative to think, what is something that people would just love to go to? And how can we weave in a customer story and a small presentation around
What is Atlassian or what's the next iteration of one of our products that's been released that we want our customers to know about and leveraging these unique events to get customers there? One thing that I didn't mention that's not exactly at the partner level, but at the company level, Atlassian is on our second year of sponsoring the Atlassian Williams Formula One team.
And with that gives us a great opportunity for most of the races to invite customers to join us in the paddock club and really have a VIP experience where they get to have great food behind the scenes.
Austin (13:03.486)
experiences, being in the F1 garage, sometimes meeting the drivers. And it's like a very unique experience that most people will never get to see. And luckily, we have those races typically are Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And we've been able to secure Friday is like our partner customer race day and partners can invite their customers.
typically sea level executives to participate in these races with us and have a day and a living the F1 lifestyle.
Austin (14:20.396)
Yeah, that's true. But I don't think that a dinner anymore is going to pull people in. You're going to have to go bigger than that, something more unique because there's just so many companies offering a dinner that that's too easy to come by. when you're thinking about you got to pull people away from their jobs and their responsibilities or maybe their families, you're going to have to offer something more.
And so in planning these, I would say like we've really leaned into our partners to say like, hey, like what are some unique ideas that you have? And our partner marketing team also tries to come to the table, hey, these are some things that we've seen that have been really unique or what are some of the things that Atlassian has done that we think would be a pull for customers and sharing those ideas with partners.
So like as the ideas start to come together and we have like confirmation that it's going to happen in terms of we've got the venue, we've got the budget, we've got the customer speaker, then we start taking it out to the sales teams on the Atlassian side to say, hey, we've got this partner who's planning this super cool event. Here are the details. Here's how you can get involved. If you can get your customers there, I'm certain that you
can come along as an account executive and participate in this event with them. And there's typically a lot of excitement on the AE side because they also want to be there because A, there's going to be good attendance from customers and B, they want to participate in the event itself as well. So they have motivation to want to be there. So I kind of find it has to be more than just a dinner to get both
the customers and the Abasian account executives excited.
Austin (16:31.948)
Yeah, mean, a fair bit of weight is on the partners to make sure that they're bought in and they are pulling their own weight to drive registration for these types of events. On the Atlassian side, like I'm helping them secure the budget, helping them drive registration through our sellers and like also like helping put things together like the agenda and just kind of like being a sounding board for it. Like is everything that the partner wants to do
in logical order and making sense for the best experience and making sure that timelines align to best practices to make sure that we have enough time to plan and promote and execute and then ensure that the partner is doing everything possible to do follow-up after the event and pulling in Atlassian sellers post event as well to talk about how did the conversations go at the event.
What are the next steps for follow up from here? And who owns the follow up? Is it going to be the partner? Is it going to be the account executive? And making sure that they're copying each other in or inviting each other to any of those calls that are going to be happening with each of the customers afterwards.
Austin (18:19.418)
well, I would love to know how everyone else does it too, but I can share what we're doing. for every event that we run, we have a record in Salesforce, for that activity where it tracks what it was, when it happened, where it happened. And, after it ends, we upload a list of domains of all the leads that we collected from that activity. and then for the next.
nine months after that activity, anytime a partner opens up a deal registration, we're able to track and basically match if that deal registration matches one of those domains that we've collected from a recent event or marketing activity. And if so, then we have some reporting in Tableau that says, I see a match here. We've got this deal registration for say a million dollars.
And there was this event that took place on this date and it matches them together and it says, this marketing activity influenced this deal registration. And we know as marketers that typically it's gonna take several touches to convert any one of these leads. So let's say for that same example of a deal registration for a million dollars, let's say it actually touched
that account five times over the last nine months. Then we basically split up that million dollars in five ways. So $200,000 a piece. And we would say each one of these five marketing activities attributed $200,000 of pipeline from this deal registration. So we're tracking pipeline, which is the deal registrations, but then we're also tracking closed bookings to see
would actually close.
Austin (20:54.714)
I can only assume, Rick, that it's going to continue to grow and continue down this direction of smaller groups. In fact, one thing that we're starting to see more recently is partners doing one-to-one customer site visits and saying, hey, customer, we're going to come to you. We're going to bring you a presentation that we want to share to give you an update on what we've been
trying to talk to them about or trying to sell them in other words. And then after we do this event in your office, you'll come with us to a baseball game that night or something like that. there's still that experience available, but it's going one-to-one to these customers because the deal is so important that the partner is going to go to them directly and try to give them the information that they need to make a decision on the
product or solution that they're offering. Yeah, that's kind an interesting trend that I've been seeing just over the past couple of quarters.
Austin (22:36.268)
Yeah, no, it's a great time to be here. There's a reason why I've been in the seat now for just over 10 years because some people say, I couldn't ever do the same thing at the same company for that long. But it evolves so quickly and changes that it doesn't really ever feel like the same thing.
Austin (23:03.619)
Yeah, for sure, Rick, anytime. Thanks.
