How StarTree Established the Foundation for Cloud GTM Success
Building a successful Cloud GTM motion requires setting a solid foundation. Get actionable tips and best practices for how to set up for success from day one in this session with Jen Murphy, VP of Channel & Alliances at StarTree. Find out what it takes to ensure you start on the right foot and navigate early-stage challenges.
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Great. Yeah, you can see it.
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All right, everybody.
Thank you for joining.
I'm Matt Coggin here, an enterprise account executive.
I've been working with Star Tree over the last six months or so,
and happy to have Jen on board to talk through how she's been able to build a
go-to-market strategy.
She's got a ton of industry experience and has a lot of great tivots about what
she's seen. Over the years and seen evolve over the years,
and I'll let her introduce herself and kick things off.
Fantastic.
And I will reshare my slide screen, but I seem to lose everybody as I do that.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you, Mac, for hosting me.
I'm Jen Murphy, and as Mac said, I run channels and alliances here at Star Tree
And just a little bit about myself.
I've been in the industry for about 25 to 30 years.
We'll just leave it at that and have almost always been on the channel side.
But in the last 10 years, I've been very focused at building channel strategy
at startups.
Companies like Hortonworks and Cockroach Labs and HashiCorp.
And really, the last few years, a good portion of that has been a focus on
cloud go-to-market.
So today, we're going to talk a little bit about that.
We're going to talk about who Star Tree is, how we thought about defining the
ecosystem
that's going to be most beneficial to us as a company, our cloud strategy more
specifically,
how we got started, how we measure that, and then the outcomes.
And one thing I do want to call out is, as I said, I can't really see everybody
but Mac is monitoring.
And if you have any questions, don't feel like we need to stick with the slides
I'm more than happy to answer questions as we go.
How we doing, Mac?
Great.
Jen's got a bit of a call, too.
So bear with us.
We appreciate her jumping on through it.
Thank you, Mac.
Yes.
So I apologize if I have a little bit of a cough while we go, but I'll try and
avoid that.
So first, who is Star Tree?
So our executive team likes to call us the solution to the patient's economy.
So Star Tree is the enterprise version of Apache Pino, and it's a real-time
analytics application
for user-facing solutions.
I'll let you read the bullets, but I'll give you the information that helps you
really understand
who we are and what we do.
So the company and the technology were really founded out of LinkedIn.
I'll use who's viewed my profile, and that is the foundation for Apache Pino.
So essentially the initial iteration of the who's viewed my profile got to be
extremely
large and cumbersome and slow, and the user experience was horrible.
It was a thousand nodes.
There was multi-second response time when you were querying, and in order to
address that,
our founders created Pino to get that down to about 75 nodes in sub-second
response time.
So it's about getting information at your fingertips instantaneously or close
to that.
Another example that everybody is probably pretty familiar with is if you're
ordering food,
Dordash, Uber Eats, in the UK, just eats takeaway, and in India, Zomato,
all use Pino as part of their underlying solution.
So if you're looking, "I want to order some food, I want to understand who's
delivering,
and how long is it going to take?"
That's Pino under the covers.
So again, just a quick hit on Star Tree to help you understand where we're
coming from.
But I've been with the company a little over a year, and when I joined the
company,
one of the things that we had to do was really define what is our ecosystem
strategy,
what types of partners are important to us, and how do they help us as a
company.
So we're a startup.
We were founded in 2019, but really our enterprise sales effort has been across
the last two years,
and our partner effort, Info Force, has been the last year.
So defining the companies that we want to work with and understanding how they
're going to help us
grow our brand and our customer base was extremely important.
I look at partnerships in buckets.
Anybody who has spent time with me has heard me talk about the barn buckets a
lot.
So one bucket is technology partnerships, which is extremely important to us,
because we need a data source.
A lot of our customers are using streaming data through Kafka,
and we've got a strong partnership with Confluent.
The value of that is it's a joint message.
It's a joint solution.
A company that's public, a company that's larger, helps validate our brand,
helps us get access to customers, and do co-marketing,
and ultimately ecosystem access once we have successes.
I'm going to skip down to system integrators, because we'll save the meat for
the last.
So system integrators are another area that is extremely important for us,
because it's a solution.
And I think we all look at our technology as a solution of some sort.
But even if we provide services directly,
system integrators know their customers better.
They have their eyes and ears on the ground in places we will never be.
And they can help position the solution.
They can help identify ways to get through a sales cycle more quickly,
to assist us with contracts and other things.
So that's something that we're focusing on in year two.
So really the cornerstone of our approach was cloud marketplaces.
So we run on all three clouds, and I'll talk about that in a second.
But identifying cloud marketplaces as a cornerstone, because as a startup,
and even as a large enterprise, the value of the ease of purchase,
leveraging the committed budget, getting access to customers through ACE and Co
-Cell,
or ACE's AWS solution, but any of the deal registration systems on the market
places
is extremely important.
And there's funding across all marketplaces to help you drive your brand
and to help you reach out to customers in a way that you just can't do on your
own.
So I'm going to pause there for a second, and Mack, are there any questions or
comments so far?
How did you guys land on which cloud you guys wanted to start with first?
Excellent.
So let me go to the next slide.
So really it was for us specifically, and I'll kind of get to the end message
and then go back and look at the boxes here.
Most of our customers run on AWS right now.
And it's a factor of who our customers are, their profile and their maturity.
But we're now beginning to see Microsoft and Google customers coming to us as
well.
So we landed on AWS because of that. About 80% of our customers were running on
AWS.
But really in the process of making that defined answer, we had to go through
another process
which was how do we look at this strategy, right?
So we know where we want to go, but is the company behind it?
Do we have the executive team aligned on cloud marketplace is now part of our
company goals?
It is something that we talk about. It's something that we review with the
board on a regular basis.
Who is the executive sponsor for this partnership?
And do all of my leaders of every group within the company agree to participate
in QBRs with this partner
or these partners as we begin to expand.
And the importance there is when you successfully implement any channel
strategy,
it touches every aspect of the company.
And when you get into the clouds, even more so because you've got core
technology factors that are coming into play there.
So you need engineering, you need sales, you need operations, and you need
finance behind you.
And marketing goes without saying in my book.
So getting executive alignment was the first step.
Once we said, all right, we're going to go with AWS.
And if you don't know, if you have customers across all three, how do you
choose that starting point?
Are you going to go with one or are you going to go with multiple?
Do you want to just public listing or do you want to transactable listing?
And then how do you list?
So we chose one because, and I think starting with one is an important factor
for most companies because you can focus
because you can understand what the requirements are.
You can take your lessons and then when you're ready to expand to another cloud
and add another marketplace,
you can just take those and go and it'll make it a lot easier the second time.
Transactable listings and private offers are important to us, so that was kind
of an easy checkbox to talk through.
And then the how will we list is really where a tackle comes in.
So I'm a multiple time customer of tackle through a couple different companies.
And the consideration that we made the first time I became a customer was build
or buy.
And because I focus in startups, the build is a hard one because you have to
carve out engineering resources.
You have to ensure that everybody is behind it and maintaining it.
Whereas if you leverage someone like tackle, it's a single pane of glass.
They're leveraging the APIs and there's very minimal engagement from the
engineering team required,
which allows them to focus on ensuring the product.
So that's how we chose our starting point and the process that we went through.
And then now we've got alignment, we've got a starting point.
How do we actually get going?
You know, really we wanted to build a plan where we could amplify the
partnership.
What's the program that we want to participate in with AWS?
How does that program enable us to engage with their teams?
And then what marketing opportunities are available to us?
And what we did internally was map that out based on what we knew.
So, and I'll talk about it a bit in the next slide.
Once we were able to implement, we had some thoughts already down on paper and
we just began to drive that with AWS in our partner team.
And then finally, the most important thing is, you know, internally all roads
have to lead to a marketplace when you make this decision.
You have to have compensation alignment, you have to have marketing plans where
they actually carve out activities with the partners.
And there's a constant focus on CoSIL.
So that's how we defined our strategy.
That's the internal process that we went through and how we have kind of set
the foundation for the organization as we continue to go through these
partnerships.
Does that make sense to everybody?
Mack, I'm kind of asking you because I can't see anybody.
I think that was a lot of sentiment that was coming out of the sessions
yesterday were around the challenges that they might find with executive
alignment or where to start and how to start.
What one of these did you find the most challenging?
And then which one potentially took the longest for you to overcome?
Maybe not the most challenging but just time consuming so that people can kind
of know that they're doing the right things.
It just takes longer.
Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is ensuring that finance is aligned.
And I had told Mack this story, when I joined Star Tree, my first day was our
sales kick off and my second day I had to give a strategy presentation.
But that first day our head of finance presented and he actually talked about
the importance of marketplaces from his lens and I had never even discussed it
with him.
So I was extremely fortunate that he was bought in but I do think that finance
has to understand the value that we get as a company.
You know, getting access to those committed funds when a company has made a
commitment to one of the cloud vendors, the ease of paperwork, the single pane
of glass that we get by working with tackle and tracking everything.
Once they understand that and you have finance behind, it's a little easier to
line everyone else up to it.
Does that make sense?
Great. Yeah, I think the finance piece is sometimes overlooked and it's if you
can get to that access early and find the benefit and find the value there, it
could probably make the conversations internally a lot easier.
Exactly.
It's the first domino to fall, right?
Once they are aligned and once they're supportive, comp plans fall into place,
you know, they understand that they need to build in the very minimal margins
that the cloud marketplace has take for transaction fees now.
And it just makes it much more simple.
So once we had our strategy in place, it was really around how do we get
started.
And I mentioned focus, right?
So a single cloud, I do think it's important.
I think it's important because your team is getting up to speed.
It allows you to get specific proof points that you take back to the
organization and then you can say, all right, we're going to just replicate
this across the other platforms once we get there.
Choosing a program is extremely important, especially when AWS is your choice.
AWS is very programmatic focused and I always, not in a negative way, I always
talk about it as checkboxes because if you check the boxes, you move forward.
And we were very fortunate and we're invited to be part of the Global Startup
Program, which caused us to actually really force delivering against
requirements quickly because Global Startup is a phenomenal program, but you
have to deliver pretty quickly.
So that's how we made it happen.
I can go into a lot of detail if it's beneficial to folks, but I think there
might be some things on the next slide that's a little more interesting.
The investment that we made, so partnership development, where there are people
from every team in our company that are tied into this partnership, we have
done executive briefings with AWS, both in Seattle and at our offices.
We have the team aligned on a broad map from a product perspective, our account
executive who owns us as a customer works very closely with our partner
development manager.
And I think that's essential as well.
We also have essays aligned with us at AWS that work pretty closely together.
So that development and ensuring that you've got resources on both sides that
are talking consistently.
I always like to tell my team that you should be daily, weekly, working with
your peers, monthly, working with their leadership and quarterly, working with
the executives.
And thinking about that cadence and thinking about the activities that align to
that really help you deliver against it.
Marketing is important for us, so it does change how you view marketing once
you incorporate these partners, because you get to leverage their brand, but
they don't always really push you to amplify your brand.
So you've got to find ways to take advantage of that.
We do things like joint case studies that AWS is helping to develop and promote
on our behalf.
So figuring out what marketing activities are good for you and taking advantage
of that.
And then again, the executive engagement.
Then we drive over to the compensation, but this is really more about how do
you engage your sellers than it is about comp, although comp is the end game
here.
So training sellers, and we'll talk a little bit about enablement in the next
slide, but making sure your sellers understand what the value of the market
places is.
Excuse me.
And also, how do they talk to their customers about that value?
How do they talk them through?
Do you have a marketplace commitment?
Do you buy through the marketplace?
Can we take this that way?
Excuse me, just one second.
I apologize.
No, it's okay.
I think one of the interesting things that's about this process for you is that
you've been able to replicate it across Microsoft and Google now and you're
expanding in those areas.
So it was once you got there at groundswell in there for one, and people knew
what their roles were.
It's very easy to go and execute in the second and third cloud and then allow
you to potentially increase your revenue through those places.
And then the last point that I'll kind of hit on here because it's something
that I've done at a couple companies now, and it is a tremendously effective
tool for our sellers.
We actually have spiffed our sellers for doing nothing more than creating a
private offer and closing a deal through a private offer.
Excuse me.
So, for, and it's not something that's ongoing.
We did it for a quarter and we tripled the number of private offers that we
executed in that quarter.
So it's just to kind of build that muscle memory for them and make sure that
they understand the process.
And once they do it a couple times, it becomes, they understand how easy it is,
and it becomes part of their go to market strategy.
So we got about a minute and a half, Jen left. I want to quickly talk about
your outcomes.
Sure.
We'll just have to skip over what you measured, but I think the needle in
pieces really interesting to some people.
So, you just suck on touch on that for two seconds.
Yep. So, basically, we look at metrics on a quarterly basis.
We execute against all these and we adjust as we go.
And the able that being one that, excuse me, I apologize.
An able man is one where I have actual MBOs tied to my team to drive internal
and external enablement sessions on a quarterly basis.
Because our sellers and our partner sellers need to hear it a lot of times in
order to be able to incorporate it.
And I will kind of flip to outcomes because one of the key outcomes that we all
strive for here is source leads from these partners.
And because we've done those enablement sessions, we have gotten source leads.
And one in our last quarter was brought to us by AWS.
It closed within a month and it was a six figure deal, which for a first deal
for us was a somewhat shortened cycle and a pretty solid opportunity.
Great.
Great outcome.
We have 15 seconds left or so.
You want to just give maybe one piece of advice that you've learned over the
last years.
We'll see how many years.
Absolutely.
So, I would say it's about internal alignment, understanding where you want to
go, what you want to get out of it and making sure your leadership team is
behind you.
And continuing to adjust your measurements as you go forward.
Great.
Thank you for joining.
Thank you and thank you everyone.
Thank you.
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