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 everybody to ChannelWaves.

Very excited to have Larry Walsh joining us.

Larry, thanks for taking a little bit

of time to spend with us today.

Much appreciated.

Have a little time for you. Thank you.

And for those of you who don't know, Larry

is the CEO and found of Channelnomics and

an industry veteran for many, many years.

Yeah, I thought we weren't going to talk about that.

I know, but you've grown wise.

You've grown wise over the years, Larry.

Oh, I don't know if wise is the way I would say it.

I think that's battle hardened. Okay.

The whole thing today was I wanted to have

a stress free, not that stressful doing this, but

have kind of a fun podcast with Larry.

And we're going to do word association,

by the way, after everything we've got

through talking about, we're doing word association.

I'm literally going to just throw out words and Larry

is going to tell us what he thinks and he's

welcome to do the same thing as well.

And we're going to see if we can create a few

wisdoms, few takeaways and have some fun when we do that.

Are you good with that, by the way?

I didn't tell Larry this is what we're. I'm fine.

I'm fine with that.

I'm game for anything.

Okay, all right, all right.

So first word, AI.

Overused.

Okay.

You have to respond with more than like three words.

This is part of the game. Right.

Okay, so you actually want me to.

We have to have a little bit

of a conversation, stream of consciousness on this. Right?

A little bit of stream of

consciousness would help you, honestly. All right. Yeah.

No, so AI, it's highly

tortured, overused and hugely transformative.

Not today.

I think that AI is, you know, one of the things.

This is something.

One of our clients came to us because they went

all in on AI and they're not an AI company.

They have AI baked into their applications and

it's very good and it's very effective.

So I don't dispute that they are leveraging AI for

the betterment of their product, but they over rotated on

it and they got a lot in at first.

They got the big push of the spike that comes with it.

And then after a while people like going,

but you're really not an AI company.

And I go, yeah, no kidding, you're not.

And there's a lot of evidence that's building out there

that AI is a piece of things, not the thing.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece this morning talking

about the difficulties companies are having in adopting AI because

it's not a product per se, it is a, it

is something that makes other things better.

Now you can say, look at GPT and

say yeah, GPT is making writers out of

non-writers or making emails better, debatable.

But AI is, I think they over promise too quickly.

It is going to revolutionize a lot of things.

It's going to make the world a better place.

It's just going to take longer

than people think it's going to.

And I think that when the analysts are out there

saying oh it's going to do this over the next

three years, yeah, could do some of that.

The real stuff's still down the line.

And I think that it's like everything else, it's

a journey that we're going to go on. Okay.

Purpose built generative AI in

a channel marketing application.

Okay, that's more than one word.

That's a little bit over.

That is more than one word.

But you also said math would not be involved.

Look, and look, I'm on record as saying this

about the incorporation of AI into marketing automation tools,

particularly around what StructuredWeb is doing.

So I'll give you guys a

heartfelt and sincere plug on this.

Is that the work that you're doing in

terms of incorporating generative AI into marketing automation

or marketing resources is, is really transformative.

It's one of these things that I remember the first

time I sat down here with Daniel and this and

he was walking me through your AI capabilities.

This is amazing that, that you

can actually create compelling content and

images in different languages almost instantly.

And I actually see this is going to be

one of the places where AI is going to

have a real impact on channel marketing both into

the partners as well as for the partners.

Partners don't have time to go hunt down the

latest template or the customizable white paper reports products

like they don't what you're doing and others like

you are doing making it a lot simpler for

them to consume, create and utilize materials in marketing

that is producing benefits for themselves.

You know this idea of going hunting and pecking

through a portal that's going to go away.

I think that that's the real

value that comes out of the.

Out of the AI use case.

StructuredWeb has developed.

Irish Whiskey? Writer's Tears every day.

I mean like me you want, I had to throw, I

had to throw that one out there because I wasn't sure

whether your feelings about purpose built generative AI were before we

shared a glass of whiskey or after we. Oh, no, no.

I mean, look, I mean, it's hard for me

to talk about Irish whiskey since I quit drinking.

Wait, really? Wait?

Yeah, no, I ran out last night.

I have to stop at the store on my way home from work.

Okay.

Yeah, we're going to switch back and forth.

Attribution.

I can't put my finger on it. Okay.

Which by the way is the problem with attribution

is that I'd be there for a minute.

I was like, come on, I'm having

an attribution conversation twice a day.

And by the way, I used to have it once

a week and then it went to once a day.

Now it's twice a day.

At an event a couple of weeks ago in Orlando

where I was facilitating a series of workshops.

Channel Data Management is one of the biggest

problems that we face in this industry.

And a lot of it comes down to attribution is one

problem because we don't know where the data is coming from.

We don't know.

We don't have access to the right data.

There's no company really does have a

single source of truth, and that's problematic.

And when people talk about channels as being overlays

to an organization, it's an overlay to the sales

organization or overlay to operations or whatever.

It really isn't.

Channels are really under and they are

fragmented across these different vendor organizations.

And the ownership of the data often is not the

channel that owns it, it's somebody else that owns and

the channel is actually getting access to it.

It makes it very hard to demonstrate that

you did something or a partner did something.

And in fact, one of one organization that we work

with, we were talking about this and they said it's

really easy for the sales team to dismiss the value

of partners because even when you have the data, there

isn't a partner in the room when they're discussing it.

So it's like, no, I did that. No, not the partner.

Yeah, I know what it says here.

But the partner says that the other problem

with channel data management is people don't.

Even if you have good data, people don't believe it.

And, you know, you can light it up and

say, this is what we all agree on.

And they will then go hunting for more because there's

a huge amount of confirmation bias or recency bias that

comes goes into channel analytics or at least within these

teams and they go looking for more.

And I have to tell people more is not better.

You know, agreement is better.

You know, this is what we're going to measure.

This is how we're going to measure it.

And we're going to accept whatever

comes out on the other side.

And there isn't enough of that conversation

happening in the beginning of that process.

Which makes the attribution problem even harder.

Yeah, we could go down this path. Right.

I used to run an MDF company and trying to manage

attribution to that for an ROI inside an MDF company.

And now in the marketing side, this is

where I'm hearing, in the marketing side.

So I know we talked about attribution.

I threw that as one word marketing.

Channel marketing attribution is one thing I

was going to throw out as well.

Because of that, I'm getting hit on more and more.

It's not just do we have partners using a platform?

Do we have the right partners using the

platform and can we tie platform to outcome?

I mean, look here, I was way more than one word.

Sorry, Larry.

Oh, no, but look, before we move,

before we move on, MDF is MDF

And attribution is an issue that comes up all the time.

I gave a partner a dollar in MDF.

Six months later I see a sale.

Did the MDF lead to that sale?

And the answer to that question is maybe.

But all kinds of other things happen in between. But.

And people say, well, which one did it?

I said, they all did it.

It's a concert of activities and investments that

result in the sale, not just one attribute.

Okay, we could do one just on MDF or

we should just do one on ROI and yeah

Because by the way.

So how different is that from channel marketing?

Oh, I had someone use your platform to

run a demand generation campaign and okay.

And they sold something down the road.

Now we can tie in a, some sort of

code to try to track it to deal registration.

But once again it's, it's attribution at a fairly

high level because there's a lot of other things.

But people are really getting hit hard

by executives right now on that, Larry.

Or of marketing attribution, whether

it's through channel or not.

And it's a real challenge for people.

Well, look, the trend line has been the same

for the past two and a half years.

Channel budgets are under a huge amount of pressure,

which means there has to be more justification for

investment and there has to be more of a

result driven from whatever is happening.

And so you put those things together Is

that you're, it's always going to lead to

more questions on the other side, not, you

know, celebrations that something worked.

Here's, here's the challenge, right, Especially in the long

tail, is partners don't want to give that information

as they're going through a sales cycle, even if

they do that back to vendors. Right.

And we could talk forever about

the historical reasons for that.

And it's a real challenge today until there's

a trust enough that they can do that.

I am seeing in the one to few the managed partners.

You know, you got four vendors and

four partners going to a buyer and

they're all co selling, co marketing together.

That's, that's pretty good, but still a real challenge.

And I'm wondering are we ever going to

get to the point where, you know, partners

can actually help with that attribution?

Would they be giving, willing to give more of

that data or how do we do that so

that more of that data flows back and we

can actually really manage efforts to results.

Data reporting.

Data sharing is a thorny issue amongst partners because

you require, first of all, it requires a huge

amount of trust between them and the vendor that

the data is not going to get misused or

it's not going to get flipped to somebody else.

One of the problems that happens is, is that the vendors

will say, look, give us your data, give us your point

of sales data and we're going to enrich it and give

it back to you so you have better intelligence.

Well, that doesn't always work out well in

terms of yes, the process will happen, but

does it actually result in something meaningful?

Not necessarily.

The other problem though is that the partners

giving the vendors more data is problematic.

There's not a data sharing standard, there's

not one way to do this.

And I was having a conversation with a

large reseller in Europe not too long ago.

We're talking about this because one

of their vendors had implemented this.

It was a requirement.

You had to submit your point of sales data.

And I think it was on a weekly cycle.

This is huge.

This is hundreds of millions of

dollars in product being booked around. Right.

He has a team of 20 people working on it.

Not working on selling, not working on demand,

not working in market strategy, but working on

getting the data back to the vendor.

Yeah, yeah, it's a huge

resource strain on the partners.

So you combine the trust issue with the value issue,

with the, with the cost that goes into it.

That's a big burden.

That's a burden of placing the partners now If

I could wave a magic wand and say, yeah,

we can go fix this, that would be remarkable.

But it's, you know, it's, you know, it's not

one of those things that's going to happen tomorrow.

Okay, let's wind it down.

Last one, 2025.

I, you know, I wish I had an easy answer for that.

So here's what I will tell you.

So, Channelnomics, every quarter we publish

our partner confidence index for Q4.

And the basic question is tell us what

you think over the next 12 months. Yep.

And partner confidence for the next

12 months is actually ticking up.

So for much of 24 it's been at 10 year lows.

For Q4 it actually jumped up and the trend line

looks like it's going to continue to go up.

We'll know more in January when we release Q1 for 25.

The outlook is pretty strong, at

least in North America though.

North America tech spending is

expected to continue to climb.

Globally, tech spending is, I think the

analyst firms, they're overly optimistic to hyperbolic

in terms of their projections.

I mean I've seen double digit growth projections

from some analyst firms like that's not going

to happen, but it's going to be strong.

The problem is that it's not going to be uniform.

It's going to be, it's not

going to be in every category.

And I think that that's where we're going to

continue to see adjustments across the industry is that

there's going to be like in anything else, there's

going to be some winners and some losers.

There's going to be products that

commoditize, that don't do as well.

There's going to be new products that will

come on that will either take off or

they'll struggle to find their place.

But generally speaking, you know what I've

been saying for since the beginning of

'23, '23 was going to be terrible.

It was first half of '24 was going to be hard. It was.

The second half is showing signs

of life, better signs of life.

Things are feeling a lot better.

And we're seeing that not just in the, not just

in the channel, but also in the macroeconomic trends.

And the expectation is that we're going to continue to

see good times or better conditions through '25 and '26.

That's my expectation.

Now that's North America and globally, Europe is

a different, Europe is in a different place.

Asia is in a different place.

Latin America is a mixed bag.

I don't even want to talk about Africa.

Europe is in a tough spot. Inflation.

Inflation.

The that they don't have the same economic base as

we do and they have more problems than we do.

Okay, the last word. Happiness.

Getting to do this every day.

You know, honestly, I tell this.

I met somebody for the first time last week,

a client, you know, one of our clients.

And they wanted me to talk with one of their new

executives and I was explaining to her is that what brings

me happiness is the people around me, the companies that I

get to work with, my partners like Steven and Daniel at

StructuredWeb, our clients at Channelnomics.

I mean there's a lot of goodness but every day I

wake up feeling fortunate that I get to do this.

But that brings me a lot of happiness.

We're pretty blessed.

Yeah, we absolutely are.

All right, thank you, Larry.

Thank you viewers.

Listeners, have a happy day.

And I sincerely mean that.