Unlocking the Secrets of GSI Partner Marketing

Ricky Currier (00:01.173) Hey, Vivek, how's it going? Vivek (00:03.076) Hey Ricky, good morning. I'm doing well. Ricky Currier (00:05.825) It's nice to have you on because a lot of times I'm talking to people I don't know very well or some cases I've never met before and but I've worked with you for over a year so this is kind of fun I get I get to have you on as a friend and a guest Vivek (00:17.808) Thank you so much for inviting me. I know it was long overdue, right? Ricky Currier (00:21.006) So why don't we start with a little bit of your background? I know we're going to dive into the world of GSI partner marketing today, which is, I think, great because we haven't talked a lot about global system integrators. But why don't you give a little background about yourself and what you've done over the years and how do you even know to talk about GSI partner marketing? Vivek (00:39.32) Yeah, sure. Sounds good. Yeah, so I think I landed in partner marketing like most others, I think by accident. People usually come into marketing. then in my case, I was at Intel for a long time. And I moved over to the partner business. And one of the key things that I learned at Intel was how Being on the partner side helps you scale and basically help you maximize the dump. You only have a certain number of sales or marketers that you have, but the moment you go to the partner side is when you can actually scale out your products and systems as long as there's demand for it, right? And you can build it out globally as well. And that was the thing that I learned in the partner world. And organically, I did a bit of partner sales and then I moved into partner marketing. And within partner marketing, when I was at Dell after Intel, again, that's when I basically started working quite a bit with the global system integrators, saw how they operated in terms of building out their business practices for very specific high growth products that they wanted to sell. and how we could build a better together sort of story as well. And over the past seven years, I've been at Amazon Web Services till April of this year, where again, I worked very closely with some of the largest global system integrators trying to get out a lot of the AWS services to market. And now, over the past two years, especially with AI being one of the core themes, trying to figure out how we could, you know, sort of integrate some of the third party, large language models with whatever AWS had in terms of their underlying infrastructure, and then adding a solution that partners could leverage so that we actually delivered benefits for the end customers as well. So that's been my story in terms of how I got into partner marketing. Ricky Currier (02:49.698) No, very cool. It's, know, I think a lot of people like you kind of ended up in partner marketing and we've never left. So, you know, it's not the first time I've, I've heard that I'd love to get into, you know, what's different about marketing with a GSI as opposed to another partner. But before that, you know, more broadly, what have you seen change in partner marketing over the years? And this might apply to GSIs or not, but I mean, you've been at some big companies, you've been doing a lot different things across partner marketing. What's changed for you over those years? Vivek (02:56.997) I think it's... Vivek (03:18.79) think the reason why people once, even if they come in by accident, I think they intentionally then stay for a long time because things change almost every year. The type of partner that you work with is very different. Even though you're trying to sell the same products, the type of work that you do with different partners, the culture that the partner has, the go-to-market motions that partners have is very different. And that is why I think people tend to stay in partner marketing world once they actually come in. And what I've seen also over the years is earlier, I think... Most companies used to think of partners as something on the side, know, something like a cherry on top of the cake. But now it's becoming more and more an integral part of the entire go-to-market motions that any product marketing team, any product team is trying to build out. Right. So they intentionally think, okay, you know, X amount of work can be done by our sales teams and our product marketers and our marketing team. But we do need the additional help from our partners. And that's where partner marketing is becoming more and more strategic in terms of the ecosystem build out, especially, you know, once a new product is coming into the market or a whole new set of products are coming into the market, which is the case as we are seeing with AI now, where a brand new set of products are coming into the market and people are trying to figure out, okay, how do we build alliances? How do we try to ensure that you know, we get the maximum amount of piece of the pie. And the way for you to get the piece, the larger piece of the pie is by partnering. And that's when partner marketing becomes very important because you go to market becomes a very important part of the entire motion that you have. Ricky Currier (05:18.892) Yeah, no, I think we've talked a lot about in this show, just in terms of how integral partner marketing has been to the overall growth engine of the organization. You know, like you mentioned product, right? I'd love to know from your perspective, GSI partner marketing, what makes it different for someone who might be in partner marketing, but not working with GSIs? Why is it such a unique partner set within the greater partner ecosystem? Vivek (05:41.445) No, great question. think the thing to realize with the global system integrators is in the name itself, right? They are large global companies. These are companies like Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, who have more than 100,000 consultants. And there are advantages and disadvantages to that, right? So if you are able to convince... those consultants to sell your product on your behalf, you effectively have 100,000 salespeople who are selling your product. But the challenge is how do you convince those 100,000 people to actually sell that product for you? And that is why you have, that's why it's a unique challenge for partner marketers. For a lot of... Other partner, you know, and that's why the GSIs are pretty different from a lot of the other partner marketing motions that you have, whether with product companies or distributors or some of the, you know, the other parts of partner marketing in the sense that these are, you know, really large companies. They take a long time to decide on working with you. And, but once they decide to work with you, That's when you see a huge quantum jump in terms of the per unit sale, for example, will be one of the highest. So if you're selling a product for x dollars with some of the other partners that you have, the moment you start selling it with a GSI, for example, it'll be easily 5x, 10x of your average sale value. that you have with some of the other partners. Ricky Currier (07:31.99) sounds like so much of it is maybe not marketing, but sales enablement. So, you mean, you need to activate that global sales team at one account while you're building programs, building content. Walk me through some of the challenges you faced trying to bring some of these partnerships to market from a marketing perspective and what worked for you in achieving that. Vivek (07:55.258) Right, no great question again. I think not so much at AWS, but in my previous company, which was called Booby. It was a small startup that Dell had acquired. And one of the things that they wanted to do was obviously accelerate their revenue stream through working with some of the large system integrators. And what did work, again, like you rightly pointed out, was the enablement strategy. You need to find out champions within the large system integrators. And the advantage that I had was within with Boomi, there were some champions at Deloitte, and they are the ones who actually took the product, tried it out, and then started convincing folks internally that this is a great product that we should then provide to our customers. And it became easier for us because then they helped us actually build out the enablement toolkit, the type of case studies, what will resonate internally within those teams. And they acted as internal champions. And that is the key for any partner marketer listening to this podcast and trying to work with a GSI that they have not worked with before. is along with your partner development manager or your partner manager, try to figure out who the champions are for your product and cultivate them, provide them with more information than they can consume so that they are then best equipped to internally evangelize your product and act as the champion for your product. And that's, I think, one of the keys that I would think for. Ricky Currier (09:41.002) I think that's a great takeaway because I think a lot of partner marketing teams are being impacted with AI for better or worse. But that's not something AI can replace in terms of building a relationship with an internal champion and move the partnership forward from your perspective in terms of driving impact. That's just old school personal relationship building. Vivek (10:01.365) Yep, correct. know. that's something I don't know until agents are there on all sides. I don't think that can be replaced yet. Ricky Currier (10:08.221) Yeah, well, that's good. That's some job job security for us that know how to do it. I want to ask you a little bit about content because I know you and I, especially when you were at AWS, you and I did a lot of work together around content. Talk to me a little bit about the role that content plays in the world of GSI partner marketing and what kind of content were you developing that was driving impact on your programs? Vivek (10:11.652) you Vivek (10:30.973) Again, you come to the core of what works for GSI partner marketing again. The way that GSI sell to their customers is leveraging case studies and use cases. They typically tend to sell to Fortune 2000 companies, so some of the largest global companies that are there in the world. And so they have a pretty limited set of customers that they work with. And their key is to sell more and more of their services to the same set of customers. And one of the key way that they do it is every time they work with a new product company or a new infrastructure company like AWS is trying to build out new services on top of the products that these product companies are providing to them. And the way that they convince their end customers is through case studies. So they basically say, hey, here's what I have done with this manufacturing company leveraging AWS services or AWS products or Boomi products. I, you you are another manufacturing company and I can help you leverage and get the same value out of leveraging this product. And I know the work that we, you know, the insight that we had was we sort of twisted the case study a little bit. A lot of the case studies from product technology companies tend to be, you know, highly focused on speeds and feeds, right? The people are passionate about the products that they've built out. They think it's going to provide value to their end customers. And there is a heavy tendency for those case studies to be technical in nature, saying that I have put in this additional widget in here, which is why we can increase the speed of your application by 5x or 10x or some other number. Vivek (12:40.251) But the challenge with that sort of a case study we found with GSIs is they were not able to convince, for example, in my case with those manufacturing companies saying what's in it for me. So we sort of twisted it and brought a different angle to it where we said, OK, imagine that you are an end customer of the customer of the GSI. and think about how you want to present a case study to that end customer. So for example, if one of the GSIs was working with Toyota Motor Corporation, and the way we presented the case study was, if you're leveraging AWS plus a GSIs products, what will happen is an end customer of Toyota because of the work that we have done on Toyota supply chain, is able to place an order on the Toyota website, see how their actual car is being manufactured on the factory floor, actually follow the entire process till the car is actually being delivered to the dealership. And that's the way that we, you know, we did talk about, you know, in the case study, we talked about how AWS services, the services that Deloitte in this case was providing. But we did not focus so much on, okay, we improved your supply chain by X percentage. We basically said because of this usage of AWS products and the services and solutions provided by Deloitte, it's the end customer of Toyota who's able to get their car delivered to them in three lesser months rather than taking so much time. And that's the way it really resonated. So we used a lot of these case studies across the board with a lot of customers. We used them in a lot of campaigns. And we saw a tremendous amount of success trying to basically give this spin on the case studies that we created. Ricky Currier (14:48.622) Now I think that's super helpful because I know, you know, personally working with a lot of GSI partner marketers, how important content is, you know, that go to market strategy, but just thinking through what kind of content. And so I think that's really helpful in understanding not just case study content, but how to approach a case study through the lens of the customer, the results, the story you want to tell. I think just tactically, that's, that's really helpful to the audience. Vivek (15:12.818) Yep, thank you. Ricky Currier (15:14.574) I want to ask in terms of, you have content. Now we got to get that in market. And I know working with lot of GSIs, hyper-focus on a specific number of accounts. So how did ABM typically play in your programs and any advice, best practices or your approach to ABM working with GSIs? Vivek (15:32.927) Yes, think, great question again. I think ABM becomes even more important. the other thing with GSIs also is that they focus mostly by vertical. So they have a very specific universe of consultants working on financial services, consultants working with manufacturing, with auto, with energy. So once you create the content for these specific verticals, by which I mean you have those white papers, the solution briefs, and those end customer case studies, that's when we try to put together ABM campaigns or a full lifecycle campaign. So it will include content syndication, targeting universe of just manufacturing, for example. That's the one that we took. focus just on a specific geo. And sometimes, know, GSIs used to come back to us saying, no, we just want to focus on the Northeast financial services companies, for example. So you just focus on a specific geo, on a specific set of customers. So the key then becomes, you know, trying to track and keeping account of who and all from a specific customer. in financial services or manufacturing, are you touching through your campaigns? So marketing operations becomes much more important. And that is something on the back end that you as a partner marketer should ensure that you're crossing your T's and dotting your I's because you may be touching 20 people from a large multi-billion dollar auto manufacturing organization, for example. And it is your responsibility as the partner marketer to ensure that you're tracking it so that you get the credit for all the activations that you have done with that specific company and ensure that when a multi-million dollar deal is closed in an 18 month time frame, you are actually given credit for the type of work that you have done across the board. Ricky Currier (17:48.111) All right, let's dive into that last part a little bit in more detail because I think that's the part a lot of partner marketers struggle for. And, you know, I'm not sure there is any universal solution to it. But in terms of just tracking and measurement, you know, 18 month deal, multi-million dollar deals, large global system integrators, large customers. You know, how are you tracking and measuring pipeline and success on these large, lengthy deals? Vivek (18:12.991) Yeah, that is actually, I think the key of where, you know, the success and failure of partner marketers with GSIs because tracking becomes hyper important, like you said. And I, you know, the best practices that I have and you know, where we had at AWS as well is primarily having campaign codes for every campaign that you're running and ensure that you're tiering them as well. So you may have a parent campaign code. But under that, for every activity that you're doing, whether you're doing a round table, whether you're doing webinars, you are sort of putting it into a parent-child sort of tree so that you are tracking the number of campaigns that you're doing and you're oversharing with your counterparts at the GSIs. So you have to work really closely with the partner marketers on the other side as well. because the two of you are a team and you have to work together hand in hand for you to be able to track it and ensure that both of you get enough credit for the type of activations that you've done. But it is not, yeah, unfortunately it's, yes, correct, exactly. Back to the relationship side. Yep. Ricky Currier (19:27.072) There we go back to the relationship side though, right? it's like, it's operations. Yeah, computer, it's part of it. But if you're not in that, you if you don't have that relationship, you might be missing some pipeline report on, I love it. Sorry to cut you off there. I want to ask though, you know, Dell, AWS, big brands, obviously GSIs are going to work with you as a partner. You know, what if you're coming from a not so large brand and you're trying to establish a partner program with the GSI? Any advice for those partner marketers who maybe maybe I'm a GSI partner marketer in a midsize or smaller organization. I'm trying to get something off the ground with a GSI. What advice do you have for those folks? Vivek (20:08.339) Yep. I think even at Dell, when I did work at Dell for a couple of years, I worked with a startup that Dell had acquired called Boomi. And it was not a well-known product at that time. It's an integration platform as a service. It was a brand new industry or a brand new product space that they were launching in. And I think the key to success to to get that product off the ground with GSIs was getting champions within the GSIs. So you do need consultants, technologists who are using that product, and they become, you know, that product is one of their favorites. So you have to identify those champions within the GSIs, and that's when your work becomes easier because they are the ones who act as evangelists for your product and take it through. within that company, within the GSI, they tell you how to operate, they tell you who the key players are, and they act as one of the success metrics for you. So the advice that I would give is, you think you have a great product, try to identify who's downloading the product that you have. And if you have somebody at some of these larger system integrators, the Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini of the world, identify them and then try to build relationships with those consultants and get them to act as evangelists for you. And once they become evangelists, they can hold lunch and learns for more such developers to come in and try the product. And that's when you build a religion within that consulting organization so that they can then evangelize on your behalf. Ricky Currier (22:01.784) I think that's why I love partner marketing so much because the role is so multifaceted. mean, you're almost describing a sales rep from a sales rep perspective in the sense that like, I've worked large accounts as a sales rep and that's kind of what I had to do, right? You find your internal champion, you do those things to help facilitate, educate, engage, other people on board. But that's just one part of the job, right? You're also developing copy and doing operations and doing marketing. And so it's like... Vivek (22:25.021) Yeah, sure. Yes. Ricky Currier (22:28.492) You wear many hats, but I think the main theme here I picked away though is like whether you're thinking about going to GSI partner marketing or you're hiring a GSI partner marketer, like you got to have that foundational marketing operations side of things, content storytelling. But if you can't build relationships, you're going to be in an uphill battle because it sounds like GSI partner marketing is very much relationship driven. Vivek (22:50.249) Correct, it is. I remember some old partner marketer a few years back said, basically you act as a chief marketing officer for that relationship with the GSI. Because you're doing all sorts of things, like you said, between marketing operations, tracking the stuff, running events, and working on campaigns, building out content. And over and above, you need to have those relationships with your counterparts in those GSIs to actually build a very successful partnership on the partner marketing side as well. Ricky Currier (23:28.386) Well, I think this has been a great conversation in terms of figuring out how do I want to become the CMO of my GSI partnership. So, but back, thanks for sharing all the inside baseball. This has been fun and it's good to finally get you on the podcast and we get to have this fun conversation. Vivek (23:42.323) Thanks so much, Ricky, as well. I know I really enjoyed this conversation. And if your listeners have any questions, feel free to pass them to me. And I'll be more than happy to Ricky Currier (23:51.274) Absolutely. Yeah, and we'll pass on your LinkedIn profile on the show notes so people will know how to get in touch with you. And thanks for coming on, Vivek. It was a lot of fun. Vivek (24:01.214) Yep, same here Ricky. Have a good rest of your day. Bye. Ricky Currier (24:04.879) Thanks.