Channel Waves by StructuredWeb

Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel

leaders share success strategies, best practices and emerging

trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb.

Here's your host, Stephen Kellam.

Welcome, everybody, to ChannelWaves, StructuredWeb's

view into everything channel.

I'm your host, Stephen Kellam, and very excited

to have Tina Gravel joining me today.

Welcome, Tina.

Hi, Steven.

How are you?

I'm doing really well. How are you?

I'm good, thanks.

Do I have any lipstick on my teeth?

No, you don't have any lipstick, by the way.

We're going to leave that in, folks.

Tina and I, it's been a minute, but we've done this.

I think your teeth look great.

Tina and I have done several of these,

so hang on, this should be interesting.

It's no holds barred.

She'll say whatever she wants.

We'll make it...

So Tina Gravel, Vice President, Global

Head of Channel Sales at Quantexa.

That's it, that's the name.

Headquartered in the UK, not as well known

here in North America, but coming up fast.

We're a unicorn company.

With our recent round of funding, we are now

considered a unicorn, billion dollar high growth firm.

Our job and our lot in life and all of that.

We have a platform which enables decision making,

takes data and transforms decision making with data.

We wouldn't be anywhere without data, and in

this world, it just keeps proliferating and proliferating.

But the issue is the quality of

the data and the questions you ask.

And Quantexa is the best company I've ever

seen at being able to help with that, to

help customers protect and optimize and grow with their

information and then third party information, like from one

of our clients, like Moody's and so forth.

I asked her to join me for a couple of reasons.

One is she's in sales, and I interview a lot of people

or work with a lot of people that are in marketing.

You're in sales and there's this whole thing going on

between sales and marketing, so that was one thing.

And two, your company is very interesting

in what it does with data.

So sales and marketing, they have to work together.

I believe, everybody's talking about it in the channel.

From your perspective, why

is it so important that sales and marketing

work together in the channel today?

Well, in the olden days, five years ago, I was

about to say, you have to define that, don't you?

It used to be your funnel was your

funnel, and your silos were your silos, and

everything sort of worked that way.

Things would come into the funnel that marketing

would generate, you'd know, what to do, and

then sales would pick it up and sell. Right?

And you didn't have to be quite as aligned if you

weren't sharing themes of ideas and, well, bad on you.

But I look at it now, it's no longer the

funnel, it's what people call the lifecycle of a customer.

Some say flywheel.

I like lifecycle better than flywheel.

I do, too.

I'll start the flywheel.

I like lifecycle.

I do, too, because flywheel to me is like

it seems like it moves, and I'm not sure

it moves it quite as fast as that.

But without this continual discussion, shared goals,

you're going to have inconsistent responses, you're

going to have mistakes made, you're going

to have duplication of data, you're going

to have problems with customer handoffs.

It's just no ROI or bad ROI or downright fictional

ROI, as it could be said for many companies.

So with that, I would say that those

are the biggest challenges with being not aligned.

When I talk about what are the

biggest pitfalls or whatever, what can happen,

I can think back of a discussion.

And by the way, this wasn't at a company I was at.

So I don't want anybody that hears this running around

upset that I'm talking about somewhere I used to work.

I was at a meeting, a big meeting with

lots of companies and lots of heads of channels

and alliances, and the overriding sort of discussion and

the controversy that kept coming up was all about

attribution of leads, because if you're both support organizations,

I.e. Channel and Marketing, to me are the

support organizations of sales. Right.

You're both looking for who gets credit, right, and

when, and then you have the direct salespeople, many

of which have large egos that want to take

credit for the whole thing and don't want marketing

or channels to be represented at all.

It becomes a real nightmare and lots of fighting,

and some of these companies aren't that big.

Come on.

You should not be fighting with each other.

You've got the world to fight with.

Come on.

So that's on my mind today, is

that we only have so many leads.

We have to do all this work up front because we

know the customer is looking very early in the sales cycle.

Now on his own or her own.

They don't want to be talked to right away.

They're going to do 70% on their own. Right?

We know this.

There are facts that show this.

Well, if you're getting paid by the lead internally

or you're getting credit somehow by the lead internally,

how do you decide who gets credit for it?

Very interesting problem.

And by the way, I don't have an

answer for this as great as I am.

Well, here's my answer.

I run both sales and marketing where I

am, so I cannot think of a deal.

If I have done attribution correctly, and I take it

far back, we can talk about your sales cycle.

I'll talk about my sales six months easy, right? Right.

Probably years of building a relationship.

If I really dig into it, I can find

sales and marketing's footprints and handprints across almost.

Of course you can.

It's got to be able. Sure.

You have to have metrics, right?

What is an SQL?

It's so funny, right?

And how do we work it all back?

Maybe it's a maturation thing.

When I get older, as I've gotten older,

I'm more interested in being a point guard

and distributing and rising the tide versus just

what I assume that if something does well

that I've influenced, it's good for everything.

Maybe it's an ego thing, but actually, I don't know.

Is it?

Well, to be fair, it is.

To be fair, I think it goes well beyond

the ego when you're getting paid for it.

Yeah, and we have had that issue in

marketing and sales and channel in many places that I've

worked in, where we've had a comp plan like that.

I haven't always had a fight on

my hands, but that's what it is.

You and I coming from a different, let's say, generation

than the folks that are just coming in now.

Yeah, I think our egos are different at

this point in life, I really do.

And you're right about the rising tide.

If everybody benefits, everybody will rise

and it's better for the whole.

But when you have companies that are trying to

make sense out of how do we pay someone

in channel, how do we pay someone and how

do we give MDF, how do we apply that? Right.

Then you get into these issues.

And that's where I said I don't have an answer

because if I were very simplistic and I'm not saying

you're simplistic, but I could say yes, everybody's involved in

it and all over the place, right.

But when somebody doesn't pick up the phone anymore or

deletes your email and they're looking at you at a

white paper on an obscure site and you don't always

get the cookie or the tracking anymore. Right.

If they say no, I'm not willing to

be to let you know who I am.

How do you know that the salesperson didn't

send them to that website or the marketing

person didn't send them or it's very difficult.

And I would say one of the reasons that

I wanted to I was offered this job and

this company is fantastic and so I took it.

But my real desire was to do CRO work

because I think that marketing, sales and channels, if

done right together, could be game changing.

But I haven't seen a company do it right

yet and so I'm very desirous of trying and

it wouldn't be without difficulty to get them all

working together and to get them working together well.

But I think I've got two of them already

figured out and that is the alignment with channels

and channel sales and sales, direct sales. Okay.

To me, I think I know how to do that, right.

And then to be able to have the challenge of bringing

in marketing the same way and having them all be on

one team, that to me, sounds like fun and sounds like

a way you could really make the world a better place

if you could figure out how to do that better.

I don't know companies that do it really well.

You may because of what you're

doing but I haven't seen it.

So you tell me.

I think it's pretty broken but I

see it moving in that direction.

I think once again it starts at senior

leadership and to listen and being willing to

adapt but then also maintaining some consistency from

my perspective and then realizing if something's broke,

fix it, but give it some time.

I do see salespeople starting to

understand that marketing isn't a competitor.

It is in their hip pocket.

This is what they need and the easier a marketer makes it

to get to them to do that the better it is.

Look, I think it's not only the comp

plan but it's the culture of an organization

and how people are praised and rewarded.

It even goes down to recognition.

So many marketers that I know, look, they just

want to know that they got an assist.

This is like hockey, right?

Scoring a goal is great but Wayne Gretzky

is just as well known for his assist. Right?

As a matter of fact, if you took all of Wayne

Gretzky's goals away he would still be the greatest scorer in

the history of the NHL just on his assist.

And he's the greatest hockey player ever.

I'm sure somebody listening might disagree.

I'd argue with that all day long

and I'm not even a hockey fan.

So to me that assist is becoming so important.

I think the issue is we all have this

technology out there and we've been able to track

it so that you can get that marketing assist. Right.

And I think it's all starting to get there so

you can start to do that a little bit better.

Absolutely.

It's one system by the way

for PRM, for sales forecasting.

And I think Salesforce wants to be the system.

I'm not sure it is.

I'm not going to get into that controversy.

But that's the other issue. Okay.

If your systems are in silos,

I don't care about your organization.

If you can't share information easily then

to me there's a lot missing.

If you don't have the automation and the right process.

You got to have the right process before

you automate or yeah, before you automate.

Some would say that's backward.

Let's automate and then fix the process.

I suppose you could do it that way.

But I don't know.

I've always been process first.

I'm an automation guy.

I've been selling some form of automation for 15 years.

Me too.

And I totally agree with you. Right.

Don't automate for automate sake.

Automation sake.

I think you can do it on the same time.

But if you got a bad program and a bad

system or what I've seen is you have automation over

here in sales, you have automation over here in marketing.

You have sales operations here.

And once it's siloed, I got to tell you, in

today's world with APIs and integrations, it's getting better.

But there's really not much excuse for not sharing.

The only reason not to share is internal conflict

and lack of alignment from an internal perspective.

And that would go to senior leadership on what are

we measuring and rewarding and what are our KPIs and OKRs, right?

Right.

Well, come on.

Let's also remember one thing and I don't

have my direct sales hat on right now.

I have my channel hat on now and this isn't about

Quantexa or the company that I just left after seven years.

But if you do not have at the

top recognition that the indirect channel is critical

to the business, force-multiplier, leverage, all of

that, you'll never get it either.

It's a constant struggle.

I am on a number of groups where women and it's

mostly women's groups now at this point in my career.

But I hear them talking about the disrespect that

their channel is facing and their channel team faces

and it's because and by the way, I was

there for 15 years because all I did was

direct and I thought the channel was a joke.

I thought they were ambulance chasers.

And I think marketing has a

similar disrespect in many cases.

Because if you aren't giving leads on a regular

basis to the kings of the company direct sellers,

you don't matter who are the first people to

get laid off, by the way, in companies?

Okay, there's redundancy, but then when they have

to cut hard, where do they go?

They go to marketing and channel and channel. Okay.

Do you think they're doing in channel right now? Yes.

Well, yeah, I've seen it.

I have seen it with my own worse than the other side?

Yes, worse than the direct.

Because when you get bare bones, you still need some

sellers, close business, but the rest of them are just

sort of nice to have in companies minds.

And that has to change.

That has to change.

That whole idea at the top has to change because

if you are a business, a going concern and you

don't have that indirect channel wired down and you don't

have marketing wired properly, you're going to suffer and you

will never get beyond the crisis you're in, right.

It's just never going to work.

So get yourself recapitalized.

Put your organizations back in place.

They don't have to be big.

They could be one, two people, but you've

got to have them because if you don't,

you're going to suffer later on.

You may not suffer today.

You're already suffering.

You have to lay all these people off, right?

You're suffering. I get it.

But it is a very short term

fix and then you'll be in trouble. You won't grow.

You just won't grow.

So there you have it.

That's my advice for those in crisis is that I understand

you have to cut off the arm in order to save

the body, but you better get a prosthesis pretty quickly.

Okay, I was going to ask you to wrap this up with

one last thought, but is that going to be your last?

That sounds very boring.

I'm going to give you an opportunity to

do a different analogy on that one, but

I'm going to leave that one in.

Okay, let's see.

Get yourself annual, regular cadence with marketing

if you're in sales and whether if

you're in a regional sales role.

Get yourself with the regional a field marketing

team, but also meet with the head of

marketing so that you're all in sync.

And if you can do it in person, all the better.

I was just at an SKO this week and I will

tell you that COVID did us a disservice for so long,

it felt like you're breathing again because you're in person again.

It's just so different.

Yes, we do it on Zoom, but we don't do it the same way.

There's just something important about seeing and

being with the person and not just

the head on a video. Get together.

If you do it in person, great.

Start talking.

Share your goals.

Make sure your goals are in sync.

Try to beat those silos down.

All right, Tina, thanks for joining us today.

Listeners, thanks for joining us.

We are going to do a part two and we're

going to get deeper into technology and we are going

to chat about chat GPT and AI, AI in general.

And then we're going to talk about

what it really means for the channel.

Thank you for joining us again.

What's the best way for people to reach you?

I'm on LinkedIn and my email address is Tinagravel.

All one continuous word there, Tinagravel@quantexa.com.

I also have a website, Tinagravel.com, if you're just looking

for me and nothing to do with my business.

All right, thank you once again. Thank you.

Thank you, listeners.

Viewers, have a great day.

Thank you.