Building the Dream Team for Cloud GTM featuring Shane Wilson
"You need to understand what you bring to the table to ensure a mutually beneficial value exchange for the partnership. Once you identify this, focus on thorough internal enablement with the Cloud Provider to achieve significant success in the field."- Shane Wilson, Head of Global Cloud GTM, Business Development & Alliances at Veritas Technologies LLC Shane shares his industry experience and emphasizes the role of understanding the value exchange in partnerships. Tune in as we explore his journey, discuss the stages of the Cloud GTM Maturity Model, and uncover strategies to integrate Cloud go-to-market seamlessly into business operations. Shane shares his industry experience and emphasizes the role of understanding the value exchange in partnerships. Tune in as we explore the journey of Rubrik and Microsoft, discuss the stages of the Cloud GTM Maturity Model, and uncover strategies to integrate Cloud go-to-market seamlessly into business operations. In this episode, you’ll learn: 1. The Cloud GTM Maturity Model stages, including establishing foundation, building adoption, driving adoption, and scaling adoption 2. How the cloud partnerships develop over time and their significance in achieving meaningful sales impact 3. The importance of achieving product-market fit and effectively leveraging Marketplace and co-selling strategies to reduce churn and increase deal size Resources: Connect with Shane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanewilson1/ Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmriley/ Connect with Erin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinfiger/ Learn more about Tackle: https://tackle.io Timestamps: 04:44 Cloud go-to-market model for maximizing success 07:28 Maximize sales by understanding and improving channels 10:24 Understanding product-market fit and cloud consumption 14:12 Consider global volume and cloud revenue impact 22:21 Emphasizing smart Market routes 24:44 Co-selling Marketplace improves revenue, cost, ROI, margin 28:41 Veritas is focused on ARR growth and competitiveness 32:37 Creating excellence in quotes, orders, alliances, and sales 34:47 Prioritize alliances first, then Marketplace 37:08 Adapt to changing Amazon and Microsoft policies 43:19 Hire mindset, stay persistent, evolve with Market
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You talk about value exchange.
You have to understand what you are bringing to the table
so you get a mutual value exchange that put NetPause
there for the partnership.
And once you lock on that, do deep enablement internally,
enable them with the cloud provider,
and have a lot of success in the field with it.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market,
the series where hosts Aaron Feiger
and Patrick Riley share the essential stages
of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start,
optimize and grow your company's revenue through the cloud.
They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs
of their Cloud GTM motion.
And in each episode, they're sharing those success stories
from the people who have put them into place.
Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future,
and the future is now.
- Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode
of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market.
This week we've invited Shane Wilson
from Veritas to join us.
He is the head of Global Cloud Go-To-Market,
business development and alliances.
And I've had the opportunity to work with Shane
for the last six years when he first started out at Rubric
and now continuing to help support Shane
and the efforts that he's doing over at Veritas.
You don't wanna miss this episode.
I love how he is partnering with his internal team members
to really drive Cloud Go-To-Market
and optimize the impact that Cloud Go-To-Market has
inside of Veritas.
Hello everyone, welcome to Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market.
This week on our episode, we have Shane Wilson
from Veritas, formerly at Rubric.
I love the story you have to share today.
I've known you for a while, been working with you
for a long time, excited for you to share your story, Shane.
Hey Aaron, thanks so much for having me here.
It's been quite a journey and yeah, excited to share
all the Cloud Go-To-Market tips and tricks
with your audience.
So yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
I thought we'd just get started with like giving the audience
a little bit of an overview of your professional career.
I've been leading a Cloud Go-To-Market Cloud
Biz Dev and Alliance's function for the better part
of 11 or 12 years now at three different companies.
But I came up in sales earlier in my career,
so tech sales with EMC and before it was Dell.
And enterprise and commercial and different segments.
And when I moved to Seattle, I started trying to sell to you
Amazon and AWS.
For me, that was actually a wake-up point in time.
It was a NetApp at this time.
They had less interest in buying much a NetApp
and more interest in partnering together
to do NetApp in the Cloud and marketplace.
And you know, this thing that's turned into Cloud Go-To-Market
some 10 plus years later.
And so yeah, it's been a fun ride.
So for the last 11 or so years,
I've been doing this partnership, Alliance's work
with the public clouds and it's been great the last eight
or so years.
I've really pivoted that focus to not just
what a great partnership looks like
and how you run great global alliances,
but to hey, how you have to drive ARR and revenue
through a Cloud Go-To-Market.
And so that of course brings us to the sweet spot of tackle
and core plus and really just Cloud Go-To-Market engine,
which frankly is the largest lever for driving ARR
in the world right now is both ISVs
and established companies that start ups
and larger companies, right?
Think about how they grow their revenue with the Cloud.
- And I remember when I signed with Rubric,
Rubric hired me to help them kickstart
their Go-To-Market strategy with Microsoft.
Range was new to the organization.
He signed up Rubric as a Microsoft partner
and then he was like, now what?
And so Microsoft said, call Aaron Fanger.
She can help you with your Microsoft strategy.
So I start helping him like,
set up partner center and like,
let's start figuring out what our first
Co-Sail deals are.
- The Rubric stories, there was a good one.
I'm happy to talk about that.
That was our first taste of really looking at
how do we make this a meaningful sales impact,
this being your partnership with Microsoft
and that just turned into Amazon and others as well.
But initially at this point in time, 2017,
it was a how do we make something meaningful happen
with Microsoft that can help us sell more product,
help us reach more customers,
help us have a stronger route to market.
And so we started thinking about that
and working on it with you and a small team at Core Plus.
- Yes, we've come along right since then.
One of the first things I did when joining Tackle
was work with Patrick and a few other folks
inside the company to really document this experience
into a maturity model.
- So for those of you new to this concept
and anybody new listening to the podcast,
Tackle has what we call our Cloud Good and Market maturity model.
And essentially imagine this as a journey.
So after evaluating hundreds of ISPs
and where they are in their journey
into implementing Cloud Good and Market
as a true strategy or a true channel
within their organization,
now we put together the model that shows you
how you progress through each of the stages.
So think about it like climbing a ladder.
And so we start at the bottom,
establishing the foundation.
We need a good footing on that ladder
where we're gonna fall over and we get to the top.
And so we go through the stages
of establishing foundation, building adoption,
driving adoption, we're near the top,
and then scaling adoption,
which is where we're kind of fully embedded as a channel
within our company from Cloud Good and Market's perspective.
And we're really maximizing automation and speed.
So following this model,
we can systematically enhance our Go to Market strategy
and really ensure that we're maximizing our time to value
and our company's success.
So we're gonna talk about that theme
as we go through this here with Shane today.
So let's kind of start out with
the establishing foundation phase.
And Aaron, maybe you can tee us up with Shane
and how do we set that foundation right through his experience?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I loved our conversation that we had,
in preparation for the podcast.
And you were talking about really
that this is a up leveling a company's route to market.
You're now at Veritas and you're like,
"Okay, I'm gonna do this again."
And I'm gonna take all these great lessons
that I've learned from Rubric.
I've got this recipe, I wanna repeat it,
I wanna see what works, how do I tweak it,
how do I continue to mature and evolve it?
So you have this North Star at Veritas,
which is selling on the marketplace.
You know, just because you wanna sell
and sell more through the marketplace,
it doesn't just happen overnight.
What is your point of view on how to achieve this goal
of selling more through the marketplace?
>> It's interesting because everyone wants to grow ARR.
Everyone knows that there's massive commits happening
out there between Amazon, Microsoft, Google.
This is like money that is approved to be spent.
And so, you know, it's no secret.
Everyone's raising toward,
"Hey, how can I tap into some of that money?"
But to your point, it's not that simple, right?
You actually have to start with a fundamental
go-to-market and route to market
that makes sense for your business.
You have established this at a startup, i.e. Rubric,
and then a larger established company, like Veritas as well.
And you have to think about what a win is
for your company first, right?
And by that, I mean, you have to understand
what your route to market is and the components of it.
So you might have a large direct sales force.
You might be getting leads from, say, marketing
and system integrators,
or you might be having a two-tier channel model
with distribution in it still.
There's a variety in companies go-to-markets
and how they approach their own route to market.
It's super important to anchor on first
because the goal isn't just selling through the marketplace.
The goal is actually to increase sales velocity,
you know, decrease cost per sale, right?
Increase deal size, fundamentally modernize
and make a world-class route to market
for your own company, leveraging the cloud go-to-market.
And so there's some science in that,
there's some art in it, I'm happy to go through it.
The net is that you gotta understand
what my channel model looked like,
what's my system integrator model look like,
what's my direct sale model look like,
how are they all compensated,
what's that current flow, how's it working,
and how can we make it better?
And I really have a deep understanding of that
with interlock, importantly,
across all the line of business leaders of your company
to go and add this secret sauce
to cloud go-to-market marketplace to the mix
to really up-level the game
and create a bunch of new logos and wins
and drive ARR through the model.
Internal anchoring on your route to market
and making it better, that's where you start.
That's an important key because, yes,
going to market with the clouds
and cloud go-to-market is an additional route to market
for your organization.
But just because it's an additional route to market
doesn't mean it should be different
than the way you are selling
and how you are trying to unlock your ARR
and your ARR growth.
So it needs to be integrated into the way you do business
and how you guys think about going to market
and your market space and your customers and your channel,
but it is its own thing as well.
So I think that's where a lot of times,
I see partners not make that connection of like,
oh, we have to integrate this into how we do business
as another route.
So I still have to treat this thing individually
and separate, but also integrate into the way we do business
so that it doesn't feel like this thing that's been bolted on
and it's this extra weird motion that we're doing, right?
- Yeah, but no business has cycles
for a completely separate sidecar in their to market.
You have to make the whole motorcycle faster
and better in the first place.
And so we want one plus one equals 10.
We already have one plus one equals two
with whatever the current route to market is,
probably direct and some sort of combination
of SI in channel, right?
We want to amplify all that to make it 10 with the cloud.
It's a secret sauce is going to up level your route to market
and a lot of it's added in, right?
So there is definitely ARR growth with it as well.
- Okay.
So you're going to go create a world class route to market.
What's the first thing you look to really unlock
this go to market motion?
- The first thing you got to understand is product market fit.
And so you got to put a little bit of your PM hat on,
if you will, think about,
hey, how does my product affect folks
that are trying to move to cloud or use cloud?
You know, migrating to cloud has been a theme
that's important for Amazon and Microsoft forever.
But increasingly the last couple of years,
it's not just about migrating to the cloud as destination.
It's like cloud is where business is done period, right?
So when you think about your products is like,
hey, how could my product drive cloud consumption?
How does it fit in this ecosystem
that the cloud sellers care about?
Whether that's a migration story,
whether that's just, hey, a use case in the cloud story,
whatever the case is,
there's a million different business use cases around the cloud.
You just have to understand,
hey, what's my company's core value to the cloud
at a, say, brand and value prop level?
And then at a click below that,
it's important to go in and understand some of the math
on how the actual consumption
and I would say cloud consumption works
because it's important that you know
how much you matter to the cloud.
Are you just a bit of a brand value
or are you actually driving meaningful consumption?
- One of the things that has been part of rubrics
like success is their ability to tie themselves
to that consumption.
And now you're at Veritas and you're thinking about,
I need to understand my product market fit.
I need to understand our consumption story
and I need to know the numbers behind that story.
But I also need to tie myself
so that the clouds know, oh, it's rubric.
Oh, it's Veritas that is driving this consumption.
- Such a key point
'cause it's not enough to have a great value prop
or have just a great SaaS that happens to run on Amazon
or happens to run on Microsoft or Google, right?
All those things are core MVP requirements
to play the game, but they're not what makes you successful.
So out of the gate, you have to have product market fit.
You have to have the SaaS running.
You gotta be driving consumption.
But it's not enough.
You actually have to drive scale
and a meaningful impact in consumption
that's measurable over a long period of time.
And so this is where CoSEL really becomes a thing
and all the value that Core Plus historically had
and now tackle with CoSEL managed services comes in.
If you don't have Eurobrew to market locked in
where you're at scale, driving as much of your install base
toward the cloud and having that be recognized
actually is consumption when that happens
within your missing 80% of the trick
that is engaging together.
'Cause if you don't do that,
then you don't show up for a brand perspective
and the dashboards that matter for all the cloud sellers.
And ultimately, we're having a lot of first conversations
with the sellers that Amazon or Microsoft for years
when you should be having first conversations once
and then you've got the scalable system
that is actually driving consumption in a measurable way
with the cloud providers.
And so you're having that second and third conversation
and meaningful sales interactions,
after a handful of months.
But it does take time and repetition and commitment.
And so this CoSEL motion with Call of Good America
is super foundational, both to get started
and then also of course to steal the thing
for success over time.
That establishing foundation phase
of laying all this groundwork,
knowing your consumption story,
making sure you have a product market fit.
Like those are key pillars we keep hearing.
And obviously you saw a ton of success doing that.
And as you mentioned, scale
and you're talking about how do we look at now
framing ourselves up to be scalable.
What did you look at, Rubrik?
And what are you looking at now at Veritas
to help you evaluate, hey, we know we've got
a good foundation now, then we're moving
on to the next phase.
We need to look at scale.
Like what does that look like for you all?
And what do you look at next?
If I'm an ISV listening to this
and I'm just laying my foundation,
how do I know when it's time to start to scale?
Like what to you is the key triggers to look for
and where we want to go next?
Yeah, when you think about scale,
there's a couple of components.
One is net impact you can have to the cloud
in terms of consumption.
So what's the dollar amount that I could drive globally,
right through our partnership and joint sales.
Another one is volume.
How much volume do I as nice you have today?
If I'm a startup and I think of Rubrik
when we were just getting going,
it was a hobby in 20 mil company.
It was not a large company by any means,
but nevertheless, there was a volume of transactions
that we could start to build a foundation on.
So you got to look at like,
how much volume can I bring to the table?
If I actually connected by recurrent route
to marketing with the clouds,
what does that volume look like globally?
So knowing that the Americas is typically the strongest
followed by UK and Europe and APJ, right?
You got to look globally and understand,
hey, what's the volume of transactions
that I think I could drive?
And beyond the volume of transactions,
what's the actual amount of cloud or revenue
that I think I could drive?
And you have to understand like how that fits in again
with a product market fit, back to that say,
hey, I'm going to be driving, you know, 150 mil of product A,
right?
That could actually have a drag of an additional 40 mil
of cloud consumption with it.
So you're going to do some of that math
across the total impact of consumption as well as volume.
If you've got the product market fit
and you've got scale in terms of, you know,
sales reps in the field, volume of deals happening,
there's a real opportunity to go
and swing a bigger bat with the clouds
to actually have a real meaningful go-to-market around it.
And so there's different strategies you can take
when you're coming up as an ISV
to kind of get your wins and pockets and verticals
where you have six success.
And then when you achieve scale,
you can really fire on all cylinders.
And you can start talking like go on
picking your top five verticals
and picking your regions to really double down
and on events and things.
I had a great leader at rubric actually.
We talked about value exchange.
You have to understand what you are bringing to the table
so you get a mutual value exchange
that put net positive for the partnership.
And once you lock on that,
do deep enablement internally,
enable them with the cloud provider
and have a lot of success in the field with it.
>> I remember like at rubric,
that was like one of our strategies
and how we got Microsoft's attention so quickly
was we had a value of business to bring.
We had a significant amount of customers
that we wanted to align with Microsoft on.
And so we put all of those customers into CoSAL
and we just started having like tons and tons
of who we are, what we do conversations.
And by the end of that first year of co-selling
with Microsoft, we were in the top 10,
maybe even like the top five,
my memory serves me right, of like ISVs
co-selling with Microsoft.
And that really helped elevate rubric
to the next level inside their partnership to say,
okay, now how can we continue to invest more in rubric
and rubric wanting to invest more
in the Microsoft partnership as well?
>> That was a fun example where a good product market
that good hungry sales force and flexibility
in root to market that allowed a pivot
in an attach to this cloud go to market
and we had a ton of success on it.
So I think that's a really good sort of coming up story
for ISVs that are thinking about it.
And then yeah, with Veritas,
it's been an even stronger, you know, acceleration
than we had at rubric because with Veritas,
it's an established larger company more scale globally, right?
And large customer.
And on top of that, like there's such a strong
both new business and renewal business motion.
We can talk more about this, but it's interesting.
But like there's definitely motions you can create
for your renewal business and for new business,
both which drive cloud consumption and both
with your eligible for marketplace
and both have a lot of value exchange
around them for ARR.
>> Well, I think that is interesting
'cause like at rubric, it was a startup.
You're just getting everything started.
We even thought about like,
how do we build the gooid into the rubric
so that every time rubric lit up inside someone's,
you know, cloud environment, it talked back and said,
hey, we're a rubric, we're the ones driving this consumption.
So we really tied ourselves to that story.
We're at Veritas, you're now in an established organization.
So rubric, we're building, Veritas, we're transforming.
We have this renewal base that we can also look at
for a route to market or a co-style, you know, play around.
>> Yeah, and the flexibility you had a rubric
with now contrasting with the kind of enterprise size
of Veritas also has to lend a lot, you know,
to what Aaron said, there's some transformation in there
which I know is probably something that,
I know we spend a lot of time talking to our ISVs around
is like, this is really a transformative activity.
You've done a lot of the right things at rubric.
You have all those trophies to prove it
from a co-sale perspective as well.
And then you came into Veritas with a lot of those lessons
learned but moving into a big enterprise.
What are some of the things you've done differently
to help approach Veritas and really try and fast track
some of that transformation?
Do you have any tips or lessons that you learned
reflecting on these two different type of organizations
and how you were able to unlock Cloud Go to Market?
>> Yeah, for sure.
So I think one of the things back to understanding
the value for your own company at the beginning
is to understand what are we trying to do?
Are we really going for new logos?
Or are we driving ARR lift to our base or install base?
Are we doing both, right?
What reasons are we going after?
You have a deep understanding and deep interlock
with the different leaders of your company around
what is our business imperative?
Maybe it is reducing cost to sale but not growing it up.
So there's a variety you get in companies
at different phases of maturity, right?
And I'd say with Veritas, one thing that's great
about the scale here is that a large percentage
of businesses renewal.
So this is business that's probably going to come in
even if no one touches the thing, right?
Veritas is a great product, a lot of happy customers,
large renewal business.
Well, it can roll bigger, it can roll faster
if you start tapping into the marketplace and cost sale.
And so what we found is that our renewal business,
our largest renewals happen faster when we can leverage
cost sale and leverage the marketplace to get the deal done.
That's sort of a unique thing to renewals
where typically the renewal game is almost feels like,
you know, a doctor's visit you've been putting off
for three years or something, right?
>> You said it, right?
So you've got this renewal base and they're your customers.
They're going to renew.
They love Veritas.
They're happy.
The play isn't to like make sure you renew those customers.
The play is, can I bring down my cost of operations,
my cost of sales on this book of business?
And one of the ways to do that is to do that
through the marketplace because the deals happen faster.
They take less of legal's time and they can be
exponentially larger because now you're tapping
into a different budget and a budget that's probably
even bigger so that you could do a multi-year deal
and even pull in that revenue sooner than later, right?
So now the renewal play is around improving your cost
of sales and speeding up that sales cycle.
>> I mean, there's not a lot of churn,
but there's some churn.
And so we reduce our churn and we grow our deal size.
And so the fit for that renewal business is different
than what you do for new business.
And so, Patrick, to your question, what's different
or what's part of the key is, you have to understand
like this renewal business is a major and unique motion
of AR for the company and we're going to attach a model
that works for them.
And then we're going to separately attach a model
that works for our new business.
Folks going after a new logo and really growing new
software sales, new SAS sales.
So internally, Veritas, we actually have two different
co-sell emotions where we do different things
at different times for the renewal business
and the new business.
The net, though, is the same where we want to get leverage
from the cloud sellers and we want to decrease our cost
of sale, err, into your point, grow our ARR.
And ultimately, the cherry on top is transacting this thing
through the marketplace.
>> And I think that's smart and that's the right way to go.
These are valuable routes to market,
but a lot of times we run into ISV starting out.
I'm really trying to get buy-in from the CRO
to go take renewals down this path.
And you always run into the objections of like,
well, we're taking another percentage off renewals.
Why would we want to do that?
And we've already got a bunch of headcount
and you get into the whole discussion of,
well, do we have less renewals, folks,
to take deals through marketplace
because they become easier and faster
and they can really open up a big can of worms
with a lot of CROs and CEOs in some of the smaller companies.
But even at large companies,
you're still looking at a big chunk of business
that some would argue it's already going through
the process.
We're not having a lot of competitors in there.
Why would I implement something different?
When you reflect back on your conversations internally
at rubric and now at Baratas,
how did you ensure strong alignment across
the different stakeholders internally,
CRO just being one of them,
but how did you ensure that you had alignment
from everyone to go implement this
and really come to the table with,
we've got a solid plan.
We're going to do these two things differently.
Like what did that look like for you?
- It's more of a Baratas story than rubric on this one
because rubric is really about new logo, new business,
growth, right?
So that was super heavy on that side.
And then for the renewal business,
well, with Baratas, it's both new and renew together, right?
And so getting alignment across,
you nailed it.
CRO is super, super important,
but it's not just the CRO.
It's super important to have C-suite
and VP level interlock, right?
So as a leader, it's my job to go and make sure
that like I am on path 100% with our CROs initiative
per region, right?
And then the same thing with the CMO, right?
So as we think about what go to market
and activities look like,
make sure that we're adding value in the right way
to things that really move the needle for CMO and CRO.
And then even when you go across the suite to like say,
product, product care is about driving product sales
and doing it at a lower cost, right?
And the product margins at the end of the day, right?
For sales.
And so the ability for us to impact all three of those things,
like ARR growth with the CRO,
brand growth and marketing and event ROI with the CMO.
And then product margins, right?
For the PM team, it is super important.
You have to have that interlock with the leaders
to understand how their businesses go
and what they want to do.
'Cause the reality is,
CoSEL and Marketplace improves all three of those things.
It's gonna drive more ARR, right?
It's gonna do at a lower cost of sale.
We're gonna have a great ROI and events we do in marketing.
And then from a product margin perspective,
our Veritas story is really interesting
'cause you know, there's a lot of people keep in town
with money we're making on every deal
and the margin on every deal with Veritas.
And for good reason, right?
It's an established business with, you know,
the three product lines that drive a ton of revenue.
And so we did analysis when I was bringing a tackle
in initially on the marketplace side
for Veritas around CoSEL and EBITDA.
And we actually found that compared to Veritas's current
route to market, going through the marketplace
would actually reduce CoSEL and improve our EBITDA
by somewhere between half a point to one and half points.
Worst case were, we're saving half a point.
And in many cases, it would actually save us
15 points on a deal, right?
So worst case, you're making money.
Best case, you're making, you know, 10, 15 points
better margin per transaction.
And so you have to go through that with finance
and through the booking process.
You have to get in the weeds of that.
So, but having done that, then we have a very strong
conversation, change is often not good
for a business that's doing well, right?
At least for leaders that like the machine running it
as it is.
And so you have to add value to their machine, right?
And you have to understand deeply the financial impact
you're going to have as well.
And so I would encourage anyone watching this to go in
and look at the cost of sale and look at the margin stack,
look at the EBITDA and like really, really do the math
to understand what the net, net impact of a marketplace
transaction is.
Ververa, CoSEL turned out to be positive,
to very positive in many cases.
- My former colleagues all just perked up with the EBITDA
and the margin conversation.
I know there was a lot of reporting we had to do.
So that's awesome.
That's a great story because a lot of companies
don't look at it that way.
And they're just immediately saying,
I have to take one to 3% off of all these renewals
and that's going to cut my margins.
And they're not considering the advantages
and the positives coming in there.
So that's a good story.
- Yeah, no doubt.
This is a conversation I had with CEO,
the whole C-suite leadership teams.
And so we anchored this the first three months,
I was at Veritas to look at all the business.
And it's been about a year and a half since that happened.
And now we're in this core scale mode, right?
But I probably should have mentioned that earlier.
It's super important to go and do that early work
and anchor both on the business financially,
as well as each one of the leaders.
So you know what's important for each business
that you're to win with the cloud too.
- And it's not an exercise you do once
and you're like, you're done, right?
You've got to kind of keep this alignment
and keep in lockstep with the business.
Can you walk us through some like specific things
you've been doing over this last year and a half
to maintain alignment at Veritas?
- Yeah, well, there's all changed at any company.
Change at Rubric, I think we had four CROs
in about four years there.
And that's just one role,
the whole org changed considerably, right?
And so there's always change in your own company.
Now with Veritas, there's been, I would say less change,
but we're actually going through a merger
and acquisition as well,
which is gonna grow us into you
by a very long stretch of the market leader in this space.
So that's exciting and that's change ongoing now.
And if there's always internal change,
there's also always change with the cloud provider.
So we can talk about both sides of that.
So staying oriented with the cloud provider
as they evolve annually and then internally,
we're gonna have one on ones with each C-suite,
the matters and frankly,
invite them to our party.
So I run say cloud, business meetings
and marketplace performance meetings monthly and quarterly.
And we bring all the folks to our party, right?
And share our challenges, our successes.
And ultimately it comes down to smart business planning
where when you become a good business partner
with the CMO and the CRO and the various stakeholders, right?
Well, then as they think about their priorities,
they're thinking about this awesome tool
that they didn't have in the past,
called Cloud Go to Market, to leverage to grow.
And so I'll tell you some specifics for Veritas
is that when we came out of our fiscal year
and air growth and competitively winning
was the job one, right?
Well, knowing that and that's gonna inform
all the enableant we do and all the route to market,
we do, we do, and all this event,
like it's very easy for me to didn't attach the cloud
go to market that we do to help drive
a shark or competitive angle on what we do.
And in attacking the right segment of accounts,
right for growth as well in the right verticals specifically.
And so this is planning with the company leaders
and then I guess having the ability to very quickly,
or sometimes in the moment,
attach the couple different levers that you could have
in your Cloud Go to Market toolkit,
I am gonna go after the healthcare vertical
or a FinCER vertical or manufacturing vertical.
And I'm gonna do it when we're at stage two
to achieve this business outcome that we want.
And by the way, because we wanna be really sharp
on these two competitors,
we're gonna make sure that we are loading up
our joint message for that first call
with the cloud provider in a very scripted specific way
so that we set the table appropriately
when we're going into this segment of accounts
in this quarter with these two competitors in mind.
So some of this is just sort of a sharp
internal business planning,
but you have to have that maturity of what you can bring
to the table with the cloud provider
to really have the strongest impact.
It's not a one and done either, right?
It's like, this happens quarterly.
So it's like you gotta be in the quarterly business planning.
This is the thing that goes on forever
and that's how you win and win bigger.
- Right, and I love that mindset
that you shared with the audience,
which is do this my business planning,
but you are their partner.
Like how can I partner with my CMO?
How can I partner with my CRO?
And while I'm partnering with them
and I'm a tool for them,
I'm one of their strategies for them,
I too still need to own my business
and have my own QBR
and keep everybody in the organization
apprised of the success we cloud alliances
are having and how we're partnering
with each of the teams in the organization
and the overall success that the cloud alliance is having.
I think that's really important.
I think sometimes people think about just that one,
like I've got to build this cloud alliance,
go to market strategy
and you've created it in isolation versus,
I need to go partner with different teams
in my organization.
And then I need to show them how I can be part of that strategy,
stay part of their strategy
and the way I stay part of their strategy is
I'm adding value and I'm communicating
and I'm sharing that value that I'm driving
with them and for them.
I think that that's definitely an aha moment
in hearing you tell the story
to like really crystallize that point.
The other thing that I think might be notable
for some of your audiences is that at Veritas,
I have three different teams I run
and we do it intentionally
because it helps add more value to the company.
And one is actually a marketplace business ops team
which is, hey, the team that actually makes
the marketplace listings go,
partners with tackle very closely,
thinks about how we book orders,
how we do like Rep comp,
how deals get done and quotes get done.
Like a marketplace sort of operations team
is one thing and that's really providing us service
to the business around doing deals, right?
And is co-sell in there too?
Is it like marketplace and co-sell operations?
Separate actually, yeah.
So this is more internal focus on like,
we have to make a center of excellence for us
as a company transacting through marketplace
like a first, say first class that is in
a writing first class on an airplane, right?
This is not a side card to the root of market.
You know, this is central to how we're gonna grow our business.
And so there's a lot of things that have to happen with that.
How do we do quotes?
How do we book orders?
And we had company with Veritas
with many different product lines.
How do you quotes is not as simple?
There's no simple answer to that.
There's like five different answers.
And so, hey, how do we create a center of excellence
around how we do quotes and how we book orders
and how we do a nail in it for it.
There's a job in itself of like making marketplace
a real thing, right, for a company.
That's one.
And then a separate team that does alliances.
And this is the team that does focus on,
hey, am I on all the right programs?
Or they Amazon with Microsoft, with Google, right?
Am I checking all the boxes and all the funding we can get?
And are we doing all the things to engage
with the right leaders at the right time?
And are we actually doing co-sell
and locking in this skill, co-sell model effectively,
right across the company?
So that's the core alliances team.
And they really do end to end
like how we talk to the right product teams too.
So there's sort of like a little bit of a DM hat
that the alliances team functions on for the business.
And then the third one is really the go-to-market team.
And that's the part where you once you get lock in for scale,
that's where you can really have the most tangible impact
because the go-to-market team is the one that actually drives,
the deal connections deeply gets in the weeds on co-sell.
You do drives all the sales rigor around connecting on deals,
winning on deals, driving sales strategy,
driving the marketplace sales number, right?
So you get this sort of match,
I would go the teams differently
on different pieces of the business.
But having those discrete lines of business
has been really helpful at Veritas
because it's let us go create excellence for marketplace
as a function inside the company
that matters and works at the end of the day.
'Cause if a rest of LA sucks on marketplace,
then we're gonna wanna eat that meal from a sales perspective.
And then having an excellent excellence on alliances
to go and be world class in every possible way
with all the club providers.
And then have a team focused on the actual go-to-market
to drive co-sell and marketplace wins
and really have that ARR growth impact
that ISV using established companies all want to get.
- You've established the dream
of so many cloud alliance people.
- At what point do I start creating these three teams?
Is it like you create these three teams out of the gate
and they're just like one person.
And then like as you kind of grow your business
and drive adoption and scale adoption,
you just keep adding more people into those teams
or like did you start with one team
and then build out the next team
and then build out the next team
depending on the growth that you are seeing.
- It's alliances first, marketplace second
and then the go-to-market third, right?
If you don't have this strong alliances foundation
to be on all the programs
and do any important part of work,
that's your anchoring on reality and partnership strengths, right?
So you gotta have that as your growth engine.
And then once you get that going,
as long as the companies wants to grow here
or do it at a lower cost of sale and get new logos,
well, it probably makes sense to click
on this marketplace function.
Some companies may already have marketplace running.
I have it on my team because it's so central
to how we go win as a company.
And you could have marketplace running
on some other BizOps team or something, right?
But more important than where it reports
is like the function that it serves
and that it's effective, right?
So, but alliances first for sure.
You got the marketplace function going.
And then with success and with sort of a product market fit
and scale and strategy lock-in
that we've talked about earlier on this session,
well, if you're ready to go,
you gotta bring some talent
and scale to go to market side and win.
And I would say that's probably the most important piece
to get right 'cause you gotta have the right personality
that's both very aggressive
but also very strong like partner centric person,
you know, someone with patience,
knocking the door over five to seven times
and get five to seven notes.
But also someone that can go talk to leadership teams
and set the vision and tell them what good looks like, right?
So really it takes a dynamic leader
to be some of the early leaders on the go-to-market side
to both do the hard work and do all the heavy lifting
and then also set the vision and set the leadership alignment
along with myself.
- Well, I love this conversation.
And as we're coming to an end of our time,
I wanna leave the audience with some advice
or tell us like, what big bets are you continuing
to invest in in order to continue unlocking
your cloud go-to-market strategy
and your cloud partnerships?
- It's more of a long-term thinking strategy, right?
We're trying to be very like long-term oriented
in our decision-making and the bets that we do make,
knowing that you do have to knock in the door seven times
to get it to go.
And when you're a company the size of Veritas,
this is a bit turning the Titanic
and then putting a better engine on it
so it goes faster.
Like those things are all great,
but they don't happen overnight
and they also don't go away overnight.
So long-term thinking is a big one, right?
And it's both for internal company evolution
as well as staying aligned to the cloud partners
because the reality is Amazon changes their marketplace
and co-sell policies at least every year.
Microsoft does as well.
Microsoft sometimes gets interesting
and does things twice a year
or just incrementally throughout the year changes.
And so one thing that's super, super important
to maintain success over time is how does mindset
that is in some ways infinite,
Aaron, I know you said infinite mindset,
but for me it's like it's long-term thinking
and knowing that the art of winning isn't around doing,
listening to what we talked about on this
and then doing a copying that,
it's staying very attuned to how the cloud companies
are evolving their own rich market,
how they're copying their sellers, right?
What their programs look like
and how you ultimately can help them be successful
yourself and then also, you know,
by directionally how that relationship can be
as symbiotic to help your sellers increase value
in our deals.
If you stay anchored on that being the North Star,
then, you know, as veritas and our merger,
it goes through like we're gonna have incredible success
internally and we're also gonna stay laser locked in
with both Amazon and Microsoft and Google
right in their programs.
And I would say like partnering with Hankel
is probably shouldn't skip saying that either
because one of the value that you guys have
is both on CoSEL as well as on Marketplace,
there's no one that's more tapped into the changing landscape
of cloud go to market, whether it's Marketplace, CoSEL,
right, just in general, right,
you guys are super tapped in there, it's the tackle thing,
it's the cloud thing and then it's all your own
internal stakeholders.
You just gotta stay like locked into evolution
and growth as a mindset.
>> Yeah, we help you guys stay on top of all those changes.
And we also provide that like consistency.
Like we are there as your cloud go to market platform
and as the organization expands and extracts
and merges and acquisitions happen
and things change, people change inside the organization.
The one thing that is considering consistent
is tackles here as your partner
and your cloud go to market operations platforms
so that that can stay consistent.
As the people come in and out of the organization,
your operations can stay on and stay consistent
throughout your journey.
>> I couldn't be more excited to be partnering with tackle
and with the cloud providers, the next say 12, 24 months
because Marketplace is as big as it is,
and some ways it's just getting started.
And you look at the like 600, 700, 800 billion dollars
of committed money that's gonna be spent
the next couple of years, it's sizable
and it's accelerating, right?
So there's such a growing opportunity for ISB broadly,
think about evolving their business.
And for tackle too, there's a huge, huge opportunity
to keep winning and playing the game better
than others out there.
We really appreciate the partnership.
>> And we're excited to do it with you.
So thank you for your partnership and leaning on us
and allowing us to kind of be there to help you
in your journey.
I so appreciate your time, Shane.
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us
and with our audience, so many things to learn
from your experiences.
>> My pleasure, Erin.
Great to talk with you and you as well, Patrick.
>> Awesome, thanks, Shane.
Head of Global Cloud, go to market,
business development and alliances at Veritas.
This was an episode of unlock cloud go to market.
I'm your co-host Patrick Riley.
I'm your co-host, Erin Feiger.
>> And thanks for joining.
>> Erin, I love that episode.
I'm so glad you brought Shane on.
That was such a great addition to this podcast
and you've known him for such a long time.
And you both have money trees, which I'm jealous
'cause I've got this fake little tree
from Amazon in the background.
And I need to be as cool as both of you.
>> Yeah, and I'm glad I learned that like money trees
are hardy because I do not have a green thumb
and I'm so nervous.
I feel like it's bad juju if I let this money tree die.
>> All right, so besides the fact that Shane and I
both have money trees, what was an aha moment
that you had in listening to Shane's story?
>> Yeah, for me, there was a couple big ahas,
but the two that I loved, the biggest takeaways
were that he had the three teams.
He's got the dream team.
He's got the dream job for an alliances
for in cloud go to market, right?
With the BizOps team focused on all the Rev Rack,
the quote to cash process, managing the business,
the alliances team, driving kind of the overlay, if you will,
working the partnerships and then the go to market team
who I think is more like that sales oriented.
Like for me, the big aha was someone nailed it
and they did it the right way there.
And the other big one for me was the renewals,
that conversation and how they're looking at using renewals
as another route to market and they got that by.
And those were two very exciting things for me.
>> And he took the time in the beginning
to really understand the business,
how he could align inside the business
and then went and did the financial exercise
of truly the benefit that cloud go to market
could have inside of the organization
given their company, given the way they're going to market,
given their customer base and their products, right?
And because he took that time, now he's going fast, right?
It's like you got to go slow to go fast
and he really understood the financial impact.
And when he knew the financial impact,
then going and getting those stakeholders
and starting to build those three teams was like,
easy buy in, no brainer, go invest in that
because we've done this financial model
that tells us our IBA does going to be better,
our time to sales is going to be better,
we're going to decrease our cost of sales,
we're going to potentially increase our renewal rates
and decrease our churn.
All those financials he did upfront in the beginning
before he even started building out the team.
>> Yeah, it's really a great blueprint for success.
All the things you mentioned,
the importance of the consumption stories,
building out the right people and support internally,
figuring out how they're then going to go scale,
looking at it through a transformation lens like all of it.
And then his mindset to be adaptable to the cloud providers
and get everybody else on board to do that,
that was pretty cool.
>> You've got to hire people who also have that same
growth mindset, know that this is an infinite game
that you are going to be in.
And so it's, you got to just keep going and keep at it.
And it's not like you do this exercise once
or you say this once you do this enablement once,
it's like, okay, we've got to always do this
and we've got to say it over and over again
we just got to keep working at it.
And we're going to keep making minor tweaks
and keep evolving it.
And until the day we decide like,
all right, this isn't the route to marketing anymore for us,
right?
>> Get on the flywheel.
Stay tuned. If you haven't watched previous episodes,
go back and watch those.
Each week we're going to bring you a new episode
with new keys, new successes, new aha moments
and maybe a money tree for me.
Thank you for watching this week's Unlocked Cloud,
go to market.
>> Hi, I'm your co-host Patrick Riley.
>> And I'm your co-host Aaron Feiger.
>> See you next time.
>> So pull up a chair, grab a notebook and join us
as we share the essential stages of the maturity model
to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue
using the cloud.
For more resources on executing your cloud
go to market strategy, you can visit our website
at tackle.io.
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