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, Steven Kellam.

Hey, welcome everyone, to ChannelWaves podcast

StructuredWeb's view into everything channel.

I'm your host Steven Kellam, and very excited

to have Jamie Mendez joining us today.

Welcome, Jamie. Hi, Steven.

Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome.

So Jamie is the Vice President of

Ecosystem Transformation and Programs at Pegasystems.

So maybe you could just take a moment,

tell everyone a little bit, just real briefly

about your background, a little bit of history,

and maybe a little bit about Pegasystems too. Sure.

So I've been in the partner environment for longer

than I care to admit, many, many years.

And through that, worked with all kinds

of partner types from the traditional channel

partner, the old VAR reseller model through

as that community evolved into solution providers

ISPs, regional system integrators, global system integrators.

And really over the last probably ten or

15 years, I've worked in the ecosystem and

building ecosystems of ecosystems, finding core partners.

An ISB looking at their ecosystem of partners, marrying

that ecosystem of partners with other partners who brought

complementary value to the table for the client.

So I've been in and around partner operations, channel

management, selling, marketing for many, many years and have

learned a lot and seen a lot of change.

And what I did become and built some

skill around is designing change and managing change.

Change is hard.

Change means I'm asking people to

give up things for new things.

And while people love new things, giving up something

typically creates an emotional response at some level.

People are either super excited or super protective and you

have to kind of manage your way through that.

So operationally, I've been focused on

that for a few years.

And I joined Pegasystems two years ago as

Pega was really trying to evolve its partner ecosystem

to really have the partners participate in a greater

way around the co-selling, selling motion in the

journey with our clients and start that motion earlier.

So that when we got to delivery

and our partners provide most delivery support.

Around Pegasystem solutions, we are a platform

that can be designed to address many of

the most complex issues that our clients face.

When you get partners involved early and they understand

the client pain points, the opportunities, they have, more

time to really digest that, build the right approach

to the project, the right implementation strategy.

So that's the kind of operational model

we're putting in place and working with

our partners to evolve over time.

We have a small ecosystem, but that ecosystem drives

our business and very important to our success.

So there's two things I want to talk

about, by the way, listeners or viewers.

We're going to talk about how do you do more with less?

And I know everybody's talking about how

do you do more or less.

But we're going to look at from a

strategic perspective because I think it involves.

Two things you were talking about.

One, it involves the ecosystem.

And by the way, you got to say ecosystem before I did.

So we had to bring it in somewhere.

I win, you win.

And when we go talk to ecosystem beyond partners, your

ecosystem really from my perspective when you're running a channel,

is the partners that you sell with the partners you

sell to, the resources, human resources that you have and

even the technology that's in there, right.

It all forms a pretty broad ecosystem.

The interesting thing is they're all changing and

they were all step back for a second.

They were all changing anyways during the pandemic.

Then they were all changing post the pandemic.

And then you took those changes and said

now we need to do more with less.

Which is not a change I'm not sure everybody was

really looking forward to, but it is where we are.

So I think we're going to talk about those changes.

The place I'd like to start with

is what's the partner's perspective on this?

Because so many of the conversations that I've had with

people have been, okay, here's how I'm going to change

my for vendors, here's how I'm going to change my

programs, here's going to lay out my resources.

And the first thing comes to mind to

me is how is that going to affect

our partner relationships, their go to market strategy

and how that all really affects the partner.

Yeah, well, I think it depends on which

partners we're talking about and how you react.

I mean, at the end of the day,

some of our biggest partners are going through

some of the same challenges we're going through.

Our clients are all being very cautious.

People are still kind of uncertain about the economy.

Some are saying it's a disaster, some

are saying it's not so bad.

But most all clients are moving very cautiously.

So buying decisions are made, are being prolonged.

That cycle is being prolonged a bit.

So everybody's facing the same situation.

And what I find is the partners want to

have conversations about those challenges and ensure alignment in

the decisions we're making because we're all having to

make trade off decisions on how to prioritize and

what to prioritize on and what the downstream implications

are going to be.

And they want to have that conversation.

Their expectation and their ask is don't make a decision

until we can kind of make sure that those decisions,

what those, the impact of those decisions will be on

the decisions we now have to make.

So we've had partners calling us and

saying, look, we're going to have to

make some reassignments reprioritizations cuts.

This is where we're thinking about doing it.

What will that look like on your side if we do this?

What will the longer term implication be?

Will there be any longer term implications.

So alignment, transparency and alignment

is critical in these times.

One for making sure you're not

fighting each other right and creating

collisions in market, but building trust.

It's like marriages aren't made from the happy times.

Marriages are made from the difficult times when you're

challenged and you work together to get through those

difficult times and come out the other end.

And that's true of our partnerships.

I hate to use the marriage analogy, but

we are committed to each other right, in

these partnerships, and we have to be willing

to talk about the things that aren't comfortable.

And that's what we're seeing.

And hopefully our partners are seeing that we're

willing and are actively having these conversations about

how can we do this together and get

through these tough times together.

I think that's a great way to look at it.

A couple of things.

One is a commitment is something I think really important,

and I think that's the best thing about a marriage.

Right.

You choose to commit I don't

know, partners in a relationship, marriage.

Yeah, I know.

That's why I apologize a little bit for the analogy.

But it's, you know, like, I I relate.

It's something I I understand,

but it's any relationship.

It doesn't have to be marriage.

It could be your best your BFF. Right.

Look, I think transparent, I agree with you.

I think transparency in any relationship and does that mean

you have to have some of the hard conversations?

So the questions are they may not have

enough resources and you have less resources.

Where's the middle ground on that?

And that's not the easiest conversation to

have, right, because you're mutually dependent.

I guess it would depend on the type of partner

and how critical each one is to each other. Yeah.

At the end of the day, what are we all trying to do?

We're all trying to serve a client.

So if we start with the client and we

start backing away from the client in the conversation

of what do we need to serve that client,

how do we together go to that client?

Which resources are needed, which activities are

needed to make all of that happen?

And it makes the conversation easier because when

it starts to get difficult, you come back

to, how are we serving the client?

And if you can keep reminding yourself of

that, you can get through the conversation easier.

Because we have been in conversations where somebody feels very

strongly about a program that we agreed to in December,

and now do we keep doing it? Well,

Is that the best way to serve that client at this

point in time, based on what is the client going through?

Is the client downsizing?

Is the client changing their

strategy based on economic conditions?

So that seems to be the right area to start with.

And keep asking yourself, what are they trying to do?

How can we best serve them?

And it seems obvious, but it's still hard to get

yourself to come back to those, especially when you're really

invested in something that you already agreed to and now

you're finding you have to revisit it.

That's hard to do.

Those are not easy conversations to have.

So you've got to find that grounding point.

I think it's interesting you said it sounds obvious.

I'm not so sure it is

because you have pundits out there.

Sorry, pundits probably the wrong word.

You have consultants out there.

You have groups like Forrester who are doing

very well, talking about how we need to

all look at the client perspective first.

How are they going to buy, what do they

want to do, what do they want to accomplish?

And they're constantly reminding us as we put our

programs together, whether it's an MDF program or an

incentive program or whatever that program is with the

partner, to think about the end user.

And I do think that is the way to do it.

The other thing I think about you made me

think about is when you manage someone, if you're

going through a review with someone and you're trying

to work with someone and have a difficult conversation,

it's much easier if you have a different focal

point than them and you're actually talking about how

you get somewhere else together.

That's like an age old wise

way to manage someone anyways, right? Yeah.

It's funny because I was just thinking about when you

were saying that we were on a client call, we're

doing a delivery review and the team was talking about

a challenge that the client was having with scope creep

and the business team, and the client, was wanting to

add functionality, feature sets, scope.

And the It team at the client was saying,

this was the scope we signed up for.

This is the delivery date we're going to.

And they were both emotionally invested and the partner and

Pega were sitting on the outside listening to this and

trying to help them see that they were each taking

a different perspective on what the scope was.

And they had to come back to what is more

important solving a specific initial prioritization or moving to a

different one or being okay with missing the date.

Like you can make all kinds of decisions

in that none of them are wrong.

It's getting the team to agree on the shift.

And again, that may meant somebody

had to give something up.

I had a business mentor remind me to go

back and reread what is it? Getting to Yes?

It's like such an old book, but the principles

of going back to what do we have in common

at stake has to be the pillar of every conversation.

And I just have gone back recently and reread

that to keep asking myself, okay, if I'm at

an impasse or I'm unsure, what is the common

milestone that we all have to hit here?

Or what is the common interest that we all have.

And if I can keep bringing everybody back to

that then we can keep the conversation going.

We don't have people digging in on a specific point of

view and these are not easy conversations as I said.

So you got to pick something to focus on, as

you said in particular if there are less resources.

So let me just going down that path, one more point.

If there are less resources involved, you either need to

get to a decision quicker, you have finite I think

both of you have to figure out when you're dealing

with that client, you have finite resources.

At some point somebody has to make a decision

because do you find there's any impatience in that?

There's people pleasers everywhere, right?

So what I find is somebody's going to come

to the rescue and sign up to do something

that is mostly impossible and sometimes they will end

up doing it and that's super human. Far out.

Thank you for working 24/7 for the

last three weeks to make that happen. Right?

But the unfortunate issue is that more times

people can't do all that work and even

though they will try to do the extend

themselves beyond human capability, it's just not possible.

So they take it on themselves.

And look, I try to do that sometimes too and I have

people on my team, I see them doing that and I have

to say please, like your job is not to work 24/7.

Let's be reasonable here.

This is a long journey we're on together.

Let's not kill ourselves in the first mile.

Like let's be reasonable about this.

And it's hard when you really want somebody to be or

a project to be successful or a team to be successful.

It's really hard pulling back and saying that's

not possible in realistic terms because we don't

have the resources, we don't have the money,

we don't have the time, whatever.

The thing is that you've had to remove,

you have to be careful that the people

pleasers don't jump in to save the day.

So that gets me to the second one.

That's a human resource.

So we'll talk about the partners and

then we'll talk about human resources.

Then let's talk about the automation, maybe technology and

then we'll end it up with maybe innovation.

So you just jumped into the human side

and so how do you coach that?

How do you manage that?

I've had people who work for me that wanted

to do everything and they couldn't say no.

And the problem was if you can't say

no and you can't deliver it, you not

only hurt yourself, you hurt the whole project.

I think it's that conversation, right, is giving them permission

by helping them understand that no one can do it

all and we don't have to do it all.

We have to be reasonable.

We have to set expectations

and deliver against expectations.

That's the conversation.

I'm not saying I've successfully done it in every

conversation because again, I've been guilty of this.

I've seen people on my team still do

it and it's all for the right reason.

And when you have somebody that's doing something for the

right reason, it's hard to coach them out of it.

But I think in the volume of change, we've

had so much change in this last year.

Everyone says it's unprecedented and it's cliche, but I

just think about it's not just the big news

changes that have been going on, but all the

reaction to that down below it.

And it's been personal, community, professional.

It's a lot and I think it's a little bit easier.

I don't know, I just find people are a

little more open than they've ever been to these

kind of tough conversations and being more vulnerable.

And I find that I have to be

vulnerable in order to have these conversations.

I was going to say, how do you actually

get people to do that, by the way?

If you're doing that and you got

your team to do that, that's fantastic,

because I don't think that's the norm.

Yeah, look again, 100% no, but I feel that I

don't know, maybe we should get my team on the

call to have this conversation, but I've pretty much taken.

I used to be a closed book.

I didn't talk about anything personal, I didn't reveal.

I would never share my failures.

I now openly share my failures.

I openly share my vulnerabilities, my

fears to a certain degree.

I can't do it to the point

where I'm making other people scared.

Right, because that's the other thing.

There's a fine line leaders have to walk of being

vulnerable, but not so vulnerable that people can't have confidence

that you know what you're doing and you'll get the

job done or lead them to get the job done.

So there's a fine line that you have to

walk on being willing to be vulnerable, to have

your team vulnerable so you can have those conversations,

those tough conversations, and then you've got to commit

to the people to make them successful and hold

them up and ensure they're successful.

Not do the job for them, but arm them, commit to

them, make sure that they have the support that they need.

And these are leadership lessons that we've been prepared in

getting for years now, right, and we're learning more as

post COVID times are changing us yet again.

We're learning more about what our employees

need to be successful and what our

partners need to be successful.

And a lot of this is today we have to be

open and flexible, but clear on our expectations because we can't

be so flexible that we can't run a business.

And I think in some ways we've been

testing the boundaries of that a little bit. Right?

And so some companies are pulling way back

in and saying, everybody back to the office.

Some companies that's what I was thinking of.

I was thinking of work from home, don't

work from home, what's in the middle?

We got very flexible for quite a long time on that.

And now most companies are trying to find where's the

line in hybrid have some people in some of the

times, most of the people in some of the time.

And every company's got their own

culture and are defining those rules.

And they just need to be

clear on what the expectation is.

As we work with partners, we need to understand

what are their boundaries, what are their work styles,

how is their culture changed, and what are we

doing to support that as part of our business

model in as much as we can.

And again, it comes back

to constant conversations about alignment.

Are we aligned as organizations in our go to market,

in our culture, in our aspirations and our goals?

What are the roles we're expecting of each other?

And when there's conflict of any kind,

how do we manage that conflict?

What are our escalation agreements on these things?

Because we are going to hit impasses, but as long

as we understand how we're both going to handle those,

we're going to get through it and it's going to

be productive and we're going to learn from it.

That's what we hope for.

Personal question.

My weakness has been patience.

And one of the things that I've had

to work on in the past couple of

years going through this has been patience.

So I'm being vulnerable.

That was the thing that just wasn't there for

me, and I really had to work on that.

Anything for you in particular that

you would like to share?

Matter of fact, you don't have to. No.

I would tell you, patience is also, I

think, patience for Type A personalities, overachievers, perfection

and patience are our two Achilles heels, right?

Like, we're always trying to get the best we

can get in the time, the shortest time possible.

And that can have a negative impact on our teams.

And I constantly have to ask

myself, am I going too far?

I've had my team call me out and say,

hey, you're expecting more than we can deliver.

Okay, I went too far.

Thank you for letting me know.

And I've also had them say that, and I've

had to say, you know what, it's the client's

expectation or the executive team is asking us to

push a little harder to get there.

But yeah, probably patience and perfection

hand in hand, very dangerous.

I have to constantly watch myself on those.

Agreed.

All right, well, let's shift gears a little bit.

Let's talk a little bit about automation.

And you and I have talked about

this a couple of times offline.

We hear over and over again, got automate, you

got to automate, you got to automate everything.

You're talking to someone who's run

an MDF company an incentive company.

TCMA been involved pretty much and

watched whole automation grow up.

I'm talking MDF and incentives and PRM and

TCMA and all that sort of stuff.

So I realize it's not perfect but

everybody says, hey Automate, automate, automate.

I'm curious to your perspective.

Time savings involved some of the challenges and

actually even what your team thinks about it. Right.

Because it's one thing to hear

from maybe a supplier or vendor.

It's one thing to look at it from an

executive level or management level but it's sort of

curious how even your team thinks about that. Right?

And any side of automation totally open. Yeah.

So look, especially now automation

is the answer to everything.

The more you can automate the more you

can get done, the more accurate potentially. Right.

Whatever process you're setting up, whatever reporting

you're setting up, whatever support you're setting

up, automation solves for a lot of

the challenges we face today.

The challenge we have is always, build

or buy, cost and flexibility and agility. Right.

As things are expanding and contracting, we all

built systems for expansion during COVID because all

of a sudden everybody needed us and technology

was the place to be.

It was great.

And so we all hurried and built things or bought things

and then we started to see a contraction and it's like,

well if we contract here we're going to break that or

if we remove this then this isn't going to work.

And my team will say look we'll just build a

little process on our low code platform or we'll go

do this in Excel and we've got things all over

the place and then how does it all interwork?

And what ends up happening is you

have manual processes tying automation together.

That's what ends up happening.

And we used to come at Auto-magical, right?

Auto-magical, that's great on the front end,

not so great on the back end. Yeah.

But I need experts like you to tell me and

guide me on how do I deal with this.

Because look, I'm one of those business, you know

the client I mentioned earlier who had scope creep?

I'm guilty.

I start out with a little project and I can by

the time we're two weeks into it I got five more

ideas and three weeks into it I got 20 more ideas

and a month into it I got 60 more ideas.

So I know scope creep very well and very guilty of it.

And I need the platform vendors who really understand

this stuff to say this is the kind of

thing that you want to plan for or this

is how you can bring this together.

I've been in seven or eight

different companies now nine companies.

I've used all kinds of best of

breed and all kinds of homegrown and

they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

I don't know what the next set of innovation is going

to bring in this but I certainly think we could.

The martech, especially landscape, is challenging.

To figure out how to build the right stack to

drive your business and have that flexibility, it's tough.

It's tough.

I do think having been involved in MDF

and incentives and PRM and TCMA, all that,

I do think there is a bright spot.

I do think there's light at the end of the tunnel.

It's not a train coming.

It's going to work, but it's taken some time

because I don't think everyone has really pulled together.

I think a lot of the martech companies have

been siloed in their thinking and what happens, what

you were talking about, when you start build or

buy and you end up halfway, and we all

sort of work together in this, right? When it's halfway.

Look, you can do anything in an Excel spreadsheet, but you

can also make a lot of mistakes and it takes a

lot of time, and everybody knows it's a problem, and then

you end up with a bunch of silos is.

I do think the vendors out there

are starting to figure all this out.

I think another thing is they're all trying to figure

out how to truly make it a SaaS platform.

You and I talked about that.

Not everything that's out there is configurable.

There's still a lot of coding, and I

do think organizations are getting better at that.

I get to be the first one says

ecosystem orchestration, whatever that means in someone's mind.

The ideal piece is I think you should have a

piece of technology that has a single layer data, has

a single view across the top, and has a single

data layer underneath it, and a bunch of apps run

up underneath it, and it's all interchangeable.

I mean, if I'm in your

shoes, that's what I'm looking for.

And maybe you're a year or two away from that

being really good, I just don't see it not happening.

Do you remember?

You probably do remember, because we've both

been doing this for a while.

If you bought an MDF platform ten years ago,

it was all bespoke, it was all custom.

Look, I used to have a programmer that

a very large vendor would call at midnight

and he would code it and fix it.

And he was really happy.

And I was like, that is not good.

This does not scale.

We can't do that.

And then it makes it so hard for what your people

to be successful, because I think the optimal supplier makes it

really easy for you and your people to operate.

It's not just is it easy and simple

for the partner, but it needs to be

really easy and simple for you guys too.

And I did get there.

Well, I think about it again, I agree with

you 100%, and I think about it even a

step further if we think about the client, right?

So if a client has a

technology stack to run their business.

And we see that technology stack kind

of play out over and over.

You've got the martech stack, you've got the HR

stack, you've got the ERP stack, and then you

have kind of platforms like ours where they're building

very specialized, highly transactional, workflow based systems.

Right, but we see the same vendors

over and over and over again.

Wouldn't it be great if we had,

I'm going to call it a marketplace.

That might not be the right word, but an environment.

Okay, well that's a whole separate conversation if we've

got to go down there because it'd be pretty

cool if it all was there, right?

Yeah, like the ecosystem of each vendor's ecosystem

played together to say, look, we're going to

do enablement around the staff, we're going to

do marketing around the staff.

We're going to do because when these clients

are thinking about these things, they can't think

about one app or one vendor in isolation.

They've got to think about, hey, if I

make this decision around this technology, it's going

to affect all the other things.

So how do these things play?

And you don't see that very often.

You might see two vendors going out

with joint messaging or co-branding.

You might see three.

Now that the hyperscalers are doing a lot of the

kind of co-marketing type of stuff, but you don't

have just three vendors in a true tech stack.

You might have 7 or 8, 10.

Why can't we figure out how to get a

system where this stuff gets pulled together and we

work together to enable that stack for the client

thinking, putting the client first, that would be an

innovation where everybody feels safe.

We're all getting our words in, we're all getting

our messages and we're getting to that buyer to

make the buyer's decision and buyer's understanding of that

stack so much better, faster, easier.

That would be very cool.

I don't know if we can get there,

so okay, I think three things on that.

First of all, the partners would love it

because partners, there's like six, they understand there

are other partners involved in it.

You got an ISB, you got a reseller, you've

got all sorts of partners that are coming in.

So I think they would like that.

There are a couple of organizations like

Partnership Leaders is kind of interesting, right?

They're a new and up and coming organization.

I know they did Catalyst event in Miami last

year and they did one in Denver.

And so they spent a lot

of time talking about doing that.

So I think there's organizations that

are kind of thinking that way.

I think partners would love it, believe it or not.

I hear distribution.

So distribution is trying to figure out how they add value

and they're sitting there thinking, okay, I don't want to just

be a warehouse, I don't want to be a bank.

But I see the partners here, I see all.

The vendors here, I see the end user here.

They're actually in a pretty interesting place if

you're talking on the long tail side in

particular to actually create this orchestration.

And I think that actually makes a lot of sense.

I think there I've been out of the kind

of direct contact to distribution for a couple of

years now because Pega, we don't use distribution.

But I do remember when I was at IBM, both

Ingram and Tech Data were working around this kind of

trying to figure out how to bring it all together.

And I haven't seen it as kind of a big play.

They may already have it in place for their

partners, but I know clients are still trying to

piece some of this together themselves and would love

the help of how this could all come together.

Yeah, I think it's a huge opportunity for someone.

I totally agree, this goes all the way

back when I was an MSP in the 2000's, right

I had 14 solutions as a managed service provider.

I was like, why am I going to

all these places for my MDF and incentives?

Why couldn't I have it all in one place?

So I think everybody's trying to streamline, I think

automation will get there, but I also think there's

innovation that's going to help as well.

So maybe we can wrap it up with,

I think OpenAI and chatGPT is everywhere.

When I'm at a cocktail party and everybody's talking about

chatGPT for their kids, or I'm even at church,

and the pastor is talking about how he put his

name in chatGPT before his sermon.

And it came up and some was good and some was bad.

I mean, it's gone mainstream faster

than anything that I've seen.

As a matter of fact, chatGPT is

the fastest growing per user technology in history.

Yeah, I saw a chart, where did I see that

chart where it showed like compared to other technologies like

social media and some of the other technologies.

And then it had chatGPT and it was

like straight up and everything else had kind of

a nice line curve, but yeah, scary.

This is what everybody wants.

Everybody wants a simple, like ask

a question and get an answer.

Nobody wants to have to try to figure out the

right syntax or the right questions or the right answers.

And of course all the

students want their papers written.

They do.

Are you guys using chatGPT?

Have you guys got involved?

Do you see that as a place in which

you guys do? Well from a technology perspective

we have work underway with chatGPT.

We are a strategic partner with Google.

So there's announcements.

We made a pre-announced we announced our intention and

we have our big event coming up in June.

I believe there will be some announcements there on

how we've integrated chatGPT into the own expansion of

our own AI work in our platform.

From my perspective.

I was just having a conversation with our team about where

does our portal go with instead of people searching for things

or having to go through a process on the site, why

can't I just go in and say, tell me how to

XYZ, fill in the blank and have chatGPT

just give me the answer. Right.

Especially for partners that don't have a direct relationship

and are exploring or building their business around us

and aren't yet in the formal program and they

just want to know how to engage us.

That would be ideal.

So we are having those conversations and trying to

lay out our plan for how we get there.

So we're seeing it from our perspective.

We're marketing automation, channel marketing automation

platform it's pretty interesting, right?

Even at the most base level what I've seen partners

biggest fear besides not having content or not having leads

is what to do when they get content, right?

And it's a real challenge.

You could go out and create the best content in the

world and you send it to a partner, especially the small

partners and they're like oh my gosh, how do I send

an email and a subject line to this vertical?

And I know that sounds silly but it's not.

It's a frozen moment for a partner who a

lot of them don't have big marketing teams to

understand how to do something like that.

And it's not perfect but it's pretty amazing.

And that's the road we're going to go down to

is how do we help you get your content to

those partners and get those partners to really use it?

Because if they can engage and get a

subject line and email to a particular vertical

now, we're going to have to train something

like chatGPT in our instance, right.

So it's all up to date but that's totally doable.

Just a huge time saver and

that's at a very basic level.

I'm sure OpenAI could do so many things but I

just think from a marketing perspective in the channel it

can really, really be a time saver for partners.

Yeah, 100% agreed.

I mean, look, none of us have the patience.

Our patience keeps getting shorter

and shorter and shorter.

Our attention spans get shorter and shorter, shorter.

So do I want to go do a

bunch of homework to figure something out? No.

I just want somebody to tell me what, tell me

how to do it and tell me the probabilities of

my success right, of doing this because I could see

where I would get an automated recommendation but I'd want

to be able to validate in some way.

Did they mean for this to be my answer?

How do I go out and verify that that's the one

thing and maybe it's just me and my suspicious mind.

Was this just the trained answer for somebody that sort of looks

like me or is it really going to work for me.

How do I validate that?

So that's the one thing.

And I guess I would just ask different questions

to see what kind of different answers I would

get to circle around back to that.

But yeah, if I can ask a question and get

a recommendation without having to spend hours searching websites or

reading white papers on best practices, why not?

Yeah, you're right.

I think you've got to be able to validate it, for sure.

I think you need to be able to train it

and make sure that it's all up to date.

And I think you need to understand, I think we're going

to learn how do we prompt it's not just do I

ask a question, how do I ask the right questions?

But I do agree with this.

Validate across, use chatGPT and

you validate it with Google.

There's got to be a way to validate this, right?

Well, when you were saying that, I

was just thinking so everybody started relying

on ratings and rankings, right?

So if chatGPT is recommending things, what's going

to happen with ratings and rankings and how

will I value ratings and rankings versus what

chatGPT is telling me what to do?

It'll be interesting to see what behaviors start to emerge

in the way we think and react to those things. Right.

Because we've all gotten trained to go look at

what's the star rating on that thing right now.

Yeah, I wonder, like you look at G2 to Yelp

everything we do, how many stars it has, what is it?

This will be absolutely facinating.

Will there be influencers on chatGPT?

Look, I think that's interesting.

That is really interesting is right.

Who's going to influence chatGPT?

Okay, we could open Pandora's box.

But literally, if you just want to be able

to write an email and make it sound half

decent, there's some of the simplest things possible that

you can save so much time.

But then once you get broader, then yes, I think the

answer is going to be what do you plug into it?

But remember, information is only as good

as what you get plugged into.

So we could take chatGPT, for instance, on our

system, if your partners were using it and your website

and all of your information was plugged into it, so

it was accurate and update on a regular time.

And then if they searched anything about you, it

would be dependent on your website and your information.

That's going to be totally doable.

You're going to have plugins to this that are

going to be validated by whatever you as a

vendor or anybody think is plugged into it.

I mean, there's going to be plugins

back and forth on all this stuff.

So, yeah, technology is really interesting.

We'll see where something like chatGPT goes, right?

I think it's inevitable.

The question is, how do we make it really work?

When does it become mainstream,

someone argued, its already mainstream.

So I think we'll see how it plays

in the channel, but it has a place.

I have another technology question, sort of for you.

Okay, so Bitcoin digital currency, there was a

lot of talk, and I remember being I'm

a huge proponent until the FTX thing happened.

Maybe now I have a question mark

that brought up a few question marks.

Sure, but at one point, there was a

lot of conversation about marketplaces based on digital

currency and or exchange of Bitcoin.

Do you guys see the market continuing to evolve and

embrace digital currency as a way to support some of

this go to market activity and giving partners the ability

to earn digital currency through activity and then spend that

digital currency and go to market?

Or is the world going to remain based in cash payment?

Look, I think that's a great question.

I think there's two sides to it.

Are partners going to start to be

scored on everything they do, and that's

how we reward, motivate, or incentivize them?

I 100% agree.

The whole tiering and everybody goes,

oh, tiering systems, I'm sorry.

It's just another way of tiering it is a

better way, I think, to tier things right.

Because you're basing it on it's a meritocracy, right?

And you're basing on what they do.

So I absolutely believe in

scoring based reward systems.

What the currency is that's in there?

It could be all over the place.

I had a vendor come to me and said,

hey, we've got all these MDF dollars that someone

all these rebates dollars that someone has earned.

And we could either pay them a rebate, but what if

we gave them MDF dollars instead and gave them a bonus?

And this was ten years ago, I was like,

okay, you're definitely showing me that we need to

figure out how to motivate partners to take their

money and spin it in the most productive way.

But some partners, top line, bottom line,

and actually, do you really care if

they're successful in driving revenue? Right?

Every partner is going to be a little bit different.

So I think the answer is yes all over the place.

How we're going to reward them

and what sort of currency?

Honestly, I don't have a great answer on that.

Interesting.

There's a lot of opportunity again, to build

marketing marketplaces where multiple vendors come together and

can buy and sell services, and it just

makes it easier if everybody's using the same

system and there's some tracking in that.

So I think that's still an innovation to kind of

catch up with the It marketplace in some way.

I think so.

All right, so one last thing. Is that it?

Do you have opportunity, one last thought.

Anything you want to leave

our listeners or viewers with?

Anything that, hey, I'll take it back.

So what do you think about on business

when you wake up in the morning?

What's the first thing on your mind?

The first thing on mind is, I guess,

is, how can I do more better?

Where are we on point?

Where do we have gaps and where have we not started?

So it's start, stop, continue kind of thinking.

And again, I think trying to meet our partners and

our clients where they are and supporting that motion is

our biggest challenge and opportunity at the moment, because everybody's

going through some kind of change right now, and just

trying to run a program as it's published is probably

not very meaningful at the moment.

I think we need that as guidance and guidelines,

but we really need to be responsive to the

challenges everybody's going through right now and help each

other get through that over the next whatever the

Economist would like to do. Yeah. Okay.

Last piece

So how long do you think we're going to be in this?

Do you have any idea?

Have you thought about that?

Are we six months, twelve months?

What do you think?

I'm not an economist, that's for sure.

And the thing is, it's very mixed.

It's like there's some bright, sharp stars and

good things happening, and then there's some challenges.

And every time I draw on the news and I see

OPEC cut production and raise prices, that's not a good sign.

Or interest rates go up again, not a good sign.

But on the other hand, we're

closing new customers and new business.

That's a great sign.

Clients are driving their

digital transformation initiatives forward.

And I know that's kind of a tired expression.

These are not simple transitions they're going through.

These are three year journeys that started.

They were kind of forced into accelerate

because of COVID and they're continuing to

pull those through to completion.

So we are seeing continued, very positive

movement for our clients, but very cautiously.

So I'm hoping we're out of this in early 2024.

Cautiously optimistic?

Yeah, I think so.

That's a pretty good way to go. All right.

Well, Jamie, thank you for spending some time with us.

Thank you.

So what's the best way for anyone

to get in touch with you?

I'm on LinkedIn.

Jamie Mendez on

J.A. Mendez on LinkedIn. Twitter.

I'm always reading Twitter.

I haven't posted in a while.

But either way, and happy to connect with anyone that

wants to chat about marketing, marketplaces, and or how we

go to market together in the tech stack.

Once again, thank you very much, listeners.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks Steven, have a great day.