The 'Five C's' of Cloud Success Revealed
"I believe partnerships, like friendships, grow over time. While we have many connections, true best friends are rare and take effort to develop, just like in business relationships." - Michael Musselman, Vice President for Partnerships at Astronomer. In this episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market, hosts Erin Figer and Patrick Riley are joined by Michael Musselman, Vice President for Partnerships at Astronomer, to explore the critical role of understanding goals and aligning strategies in successful business collaborations. Michael shares insights on the transition of partnerships from COO to CRO roles, emphasizing the need to balance values and immediate revenue generation. They discuss the Cloud flywheel, the importance of giving back to the community, and the entrepreneurial spirit required in Cloud alliances. Michael also highlights the five "C's" in decision-making, which are essential in accelerating cloud GTM experiences. In this episode, you’ll learn: 1. How partnerships are like friendships and that building successful partnerships, particularly with Cloud providers like AWS, is similar to cultivating deep personal friendships 2. The impact of having an entrepreneurial mindset when working in roles related to Cloud alliances or business development 3. The importance of companies to clearly understand their "why" when building partnerships with Cloud providers Resources: Connect with Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/musselmanm/ 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: 05:02 Transitioning from sales to partnerships 10:57 How Effective business development is like an octopus 15:20 Networking, revenue, and partnership strategies in business 22:27 Understanding and optimizing cloud capabilities. 30:46 Driving consumption and connecting technology to value drivers 34:58 Is cloud partnership right for everyone? 42:47 Connecting with cloud alliance leaders as an entrepreneur
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I do believe there is a lot of things that you can get over time, just like any
partnership
or I talk a lot about, like I call partnerships, even in my own world, I call
them friendships,
just like your personal friendships.
And most people have a lot of Facebook LinkedIn connections, they know a lot of
people,
their neighbors, their ecosystem around them that are friends, but you probably
have very
few best friends in your world.
And to get to that point, you're probably into similar things.
It takes effort.
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.
And ultimately, this way of thinking is the future and the future is now.
Everybody and welcome to another episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market.
I'm co-host Patrick Riley.
I'm co-host Aaron Feiger.
And today we sit down and talk with Michael Musselman, VP of Partnerships for
Astronomer,
formerly of Lacework, a tackle customer advisory board member, as well as an
advisor of
Cady Shack. He talks to us today in depth about a number of his frameworks,
successes, and
a ton of great analogies.
You're definitely not going to want to miss.
But also one key fact around how he sees the alliance leaders within a ISV as
entrepreneurs
and how they run a small business within your larger business.
Stay tuned.
Today, we are joined by a very special guest, Michael Musselman.
He is the VP of Partnerships at Astronomer, formerly of Lacework, and a very
trusted tackle
customer advisory board member.
Michael, thank you for being here with us today.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited.
Well, today, just as if we've done an every episode for those of you that are
new to join,
the idea of this podcast is to help you unlock your cloud-to-market by going
through the
tackle maturity model and dissecting stories from customers and ISVs who have
had success,
seeing challenges, and overcome those challenges on their way to growth.
The tackle maturity model is where we look at our customers in four different
buckets,
with establishing foundation being the first bucket, moving up to building
adoption, driving
adoption, and scaling adoption within the cloud marketplaces.
Each of those phases of maturity, we break down into four different categories.
We focus on people, processes, technology, and alliances.
Today, when we talk to Michael, we're going to go into a little bit of the
establishing
foundation phase of maturity.
We'll start there, and he's got some great tips throughout.
We might sprinkle in a couple extra scaling tips for you, so stick around for
that.
Without further ado, I'll turn it over to Aaron, and we'll get started.
Thanks, Michael, for joining us.
I'm so excited for you to share all your years of experiences.
You've been at this now for five-ish years.
You know, share with our audience a little bit about your first time in the
role, and now
you're doing this all over again at Astronomer.
Love to get a little bit more of a background for our audience.
Yeah, I kind of stumbled upon this, and I think it'll come up later in some
other discussions
about characteristics, and I think I've been successful in it, but I honestly
have just
been learning a lot.
So I was employee 68 at Lacework, which is a security cloud security company.
Prior to that, I was Sales Engineering, Sales Engineering Leader at several
companies.
One was in the cloud, and in that last company, I transitioned from running our
worldwide sales
engineering team into kind of a business development partnerships role.
And so that was a SaaS call, and I started working with more tech partners.
And even though we were built on AWS, I really didn't understand what that
thing was
all about.
So I get to Lacework on employee 68, and we're kind of going to build out like
what's the
partner strategy, tech partners?
What do we do?
We don't know.
And in all reality, I think because of having the background and being close to
the pipeline
and being close to sales, I started getting sellers that maybe had come from
other companies
early on.
Let's say it was Snowflake or Zoom a logic or, you know, CrowdStrike or people
that already
had strong, and they were asking me questions about what's our strategy going
to be?
How are we going to work with AWS?
We're built on AWS.
Or I'd have a lot of people, can we transact through the marketplace?
And so my first question, I was like, I don't know.
Give me a second and we'll go figure this out.
Actually, that's exactly how I stumbled on tackle, because I didn't know enough
So I needed people who knew more than me to help.
Turns out, you know, the sales team at tackle were pretty helpful.
They knew that.
And I figured, well, we could probably figure this out on our own, but at that
time, my
team of one, I didn't have any developers.
I didn't know how to build marketplace listings or I didn't know any of that.
So I needed help and you guys actually were there to help me understand and
navigate so
that I could go back to my sales team and say, yes, we can transact and they
hate to be
a smart marketplace.
And so that was the first time I met tackle and that's kind of that.
And then the journey at lacework was nothing short of amazing from just
figuring out how
to partner with a big hyper-scale or in this case, I started with AWS.
And what's important of them and what did they want us to do and how do they
measure us
and then, you know, we'll talk more and deep later about some of these things.
But in the very beginning, it was just figuring that out and then you can't do
it alone.
So I needed a team to help me and, you know, we started to use more and more of
tackle
capabilities and apply it to our business differently.
And then since then, I've been able to like speak with and in front of other
audiences,
speak with other partners, learn from other partners.
And so, you know, it's just been really, really fun journey.
And then joining us, Ron and I own all partnerships.
So slightly different space.
I'm not in security like the last run.
I have to think about all partners.
So tech, cloud, size, bars, you know, MSPs, OEMs, there's a lot more to
consider.
But I think the roots are still there.
And I'm able to like kind of apply the same thing and the experiences and the
relationships
and maybe get us there a little bit faster.
And so I'm happy to share all those experiences.
But that's how I got here today.
I was going to bring up a catty check and let you plug that in for a second.
That's just honestly like I spend little time, but it was a community.
What I found is there was very few people that I think understood how to
partner with AWS
or with Google or Microsoft.
And those people, a lot of their value was that knowledge and that experience.
And I found some of them were very open to sharing that one on one, but I
couldn't find
very little content.
There was no podcast like this.
So it's like you had to learn either by making friends or by making strong
partnerships
or by school of hard knocks experience.
And so I think what a few of us found was once we kind of figured it out, a lot
of people
would come to us and ask us for help.
That doesn't really scale very well.
So the short answer was through tackle and even their forums and some of those
ways.
But we also started an AWS community of Cads, Cloud Alliance directors called
Catty
Shack.
And so that was a simple way for us to just help others and partner with AWS
and get feedback
to AWS about tools that they build for us like ACE and marketplace.
And so I think over time that's just developed into a really neat complimentary
to companies
like yourself into AWS and to the community so that like rising tide to kind of
lift all
ships.
You're learning this through like grassroots, like hands on experiences.
You're pulling together and finding other like-minded individuals like, hey,
you're doing
this.
It's not just like you're in the role.
You're also in this role and you're like-minded like me.
And so you're starting to pull together like-minded folks and creating this
community.
What are some of those characteristics that you see in that like-mindedness?
I think you're always looking in mirror and trying to figure out, okay, if I'm
successful
in this role or others are asking me for help, I must be doing something right.
What is it that I either learned in the decade before I started doing this for,
you know,
if I'm going to go higher teams that helped me, right, I should hire people who
are smarter,
faster or whatever, I've just waddled down the characteristics that I look for
when I've
added people to my team, right?
And then obviously like there's a little bit of a mirror because we have to
work together,
we have to speak together and they honestly have to carry out a lot of the
strategies
that we come up together.
I don't know these things, I've learned a lot from the team I hired at least
where I still
am very close to them.
But I look for things like intelligence and curiosity.
I look for drive, right, I can't give you what your mama didn't, I always joke
and say,
I look for this entrepreneurial spirit and I think there's this book by Carol D
work
called Mindset and I think there's this fixed mindset and this growth mindset
and I find
that entrepreneurial type of people look at a problem and they're like, hmm, I
have to
go solve this rather than, I can't do that, I can't, I don't know how, I don't
want to learn
something new.
And then I just generally, I think, be honest, how would AWS as a partner trust
you if you're
just not honest with them?
So I think those characteristics are what I usually interview for and I'm
looking to build
our teams with that.
But then what I've realized is those skills make for really good aligns
director or leader
because what people don't see is behind the curtain, we probably spent 80% of
our time communicating
and selling to our own teams and our own business and has nothing to do with
the outward
facing partnership.
And so that's the part where these skills, you don't know how you're going to
use them,
but you realize they're very handy and helpful for getting what you want out of
your partner,
but certainly for making your team helpful to the business and helpful to all
these other
teams in the business.
That's a great point to bring up that you're looking at this as kind of a small
business if
you will within your bigger enterprise and you're trying to, trying to build
that out.
Yeah, you've got that entrepreneur, that's where that entrepreneurial mindset
comes from.
Can you elaborate a little bit more on why that is important?
A lot of people listening to the podcast might not quite understand, like, what
do you mean
I have to build a business within this?
There's very few things you can do in a business other than like, in this case,
business development
or partnerships that if done well, touch all areas of the business.
So I always think of like an octopus and I've got like eight legs all over the
business,
but wait, we started this conversation with marketplace.
I have analogies I've used them before, but how's owning a small business, my
wife owned
a retail store once upon a time and like, let's just say you accept a catch.
Tomorrow you're like, wow, there's this whole set of users that wants to pay by
credit card.
And so I want to accept that.
Well, one thing is to just say I want to accept it, but the second is, wait, I
need a bank
account.
I need a terminal to charge the cards.
Wait, I need a merchant account to process the transactions.
Wait, I used to get a dollar.
Now I'm getting a dollar less than like MxCs or Discover fees.
Wait, I need to reconcile between cash versus credit card purchase.
All of that.
I've needed to change my accounting model, right?
So even that is a completely different language that my finance team, my APAR,
my CFO, that's
very different marketplace touches money.
That makes me valuable in the business, but also like, there's a whole line of
business
there that you have to consider.
That's what I'm selling out of the country, taxation, that, like, there's a
whole other thing
that touches legal, right?
I'm signing up for marketplace.
There's these contracts legal terms of service, MSA is one of your company
calls them, like,
you're involved in that.
Where you report to is who's kind of giving me direction for what they want by
function
to doing the business.
But as a shareholder and someone who's like, yeah, I want to make the company
money.
Well, revenue starts with pipelines.
So now I'm touching sales and most of us and many of us like online to the CRO
function
or the revenue side of the business.
But guess what?
There's two sides of revenue.
Actually, there's three.
I've called demand and marketing once and I just touched marketing the CMO.
But in many companies, sometimes your renewal business is different than your
net new sales
business.
So, wow, I just touched two other lines of business, right?
Because if I don't consider renewals, well, my renewals are some competitors
net new business.
And my new business is obviously where I'd want to co-sell in some of this.
So now I've just touched those line of businesses.
Paco helps me with operational excellence, but like a lot of the people
processing technology.
Wait, I just said ops.
Now, wait, where does the ops report?
Sometimes to revenue, sometimes the CRO.
Oh, my gosh, that's another line of business, right?
All of them have different goals, different KPIs, different personalities.
How do I ever make them want to work for me for this bigger outcome?
Now, even if I am the CEO or the CEO sit right next to me, that still doesn't
mean that everyone
wants to do what you want them to do in the time frame that you want them to do
that.
Yeah.
And you've got to like change how you talk to each of them.
And as you navigate going and getting your business stakeholders on board and
keeping them
on board, you have to continue to pitch your business to them in a way that's
meaningful
to them.
And in the metrics that are going to matter for that particular area of the
organization.
I think I just had my own aha moment here for a minute, Michael, in that I'm an
entrepreneur
and created a business, sold my business to tackle.
And I now realize like why I'm so attracted to cloud alliance leaders inside of
all of the
partners that I've worked with because we all share that entrepreneurial spirit
I do really think that that is a big key characteristic of a cloud alliance
person.
It's like you are an entrepreneur at heart as an entrepreneur.
We're sometimes really hard to manage.
So where do you think like this role should best align or in your experiences,
like maybe
sometimes in the beginning of a journey in the earlier stages, you report into
a different
area of the business.
And then as you mature, you might change.
Can you share a little bit about how you've seen in your own experiences and
across having
access to lots of folks in the network through Caddy Shack, like where the
alliance role typically
is aligning and how that changes throughout the maturity?
I wouldn't have had this vantage point without kind of Caddy Shack over time
because you
talked to your peers and I'm doing the job.
And then I'm talking to others that have done the job before me or way more
scaled than
I or are just getting started, but I'm like you, I'm getting to talk to more
business leaders,
CROs, you know, SDPs of channels and partners.
I think at the end of the day, businesses exist to make money.
So revenue should drive most of the businesses, but there's a lot of different
tactics for
where and how you make money because I've also talked to peers that are
measuring like marketing
activities or influence which still equates to revenue or the number of integr
ations into
AWS services that's really important to them.
And I think depending on the outcome and depending why they would hire my role
or someone
like me or someone like you into that company, there's some why that happened
before this.
So I'm usually trying to figure out why do they want to build a partnership
with one of
the cloud providers?
Sure, of course, you're built on them.
You're spending a bunch of money.
I get that.
Why do you want to do this?
And do you understand what's involved?
Depending on what it is, there's a bunch of different tactics and the kind of
people you
hire and what you do.
But I do believe like whether it's under the CRO or whether it's under the CMO
or the CRO,
it's statistically higher under the CRO and revenue.
But there are a lot of people under the COO, under the CTO, under the COO, just
if I roll
these lines.
It does this directly for the CEO.
Right.
It really does matter, but I think the outcomes that you want kind of back into
the goals
that you'll have and then where do those goals fit into the business probably
makes the
most sense as far as how I would line that up.
In the beginning, it's more, where's partnerships or operations like the COO
and then as you start
to really get through that initial phase of like laying down those principles,
then
it's moves over into like the CRO because it's like now we got to go really
like impact
our go-to-market and our revenue and to really unlock that driving adoption and
scaling adoption.
We see a lot of times the Alliance team shifts over into the CRO when they're
kind of crossing
that chasm from this was something we were incubating to now this is something
that is
going to be a meaningful revenue channel for us and we needed to align into the
CRO.
Is it ever a meaningful revenue channel?
That's the big question.
But I do think there's a lot of it in value and intangibles to any business,
but I think
lesson number one that I've seen is that when people look at AWS or Google out
of the
gates as a channel or a var or something that they have experience or a GSI
that they have
experience working with and they apply that experience and that lens to this
partner.
I think there's just a misalignment forever of expectations and I do believe
whether we're
talking about Google or AWS, they are incredibly impactful and helpful to your
business and they
can definitely do things that you can't do on your own, but if it's like an ATM
where I put
in my card and I get a 20 out, it doesn't work that way.
And so I have to remember this conversation a couple times where I was like,
what do I get
out of them?
What revenue or pipeline do I get?
I was like, zero.
First time I ever met my CFO, he asked me that question.
I was like, zero.
This doesn't make a lot of sense.
And I was like, well, that's not the right question.
It's kind of like, well, then what do we get?
I was like, ah, then now we're in a better discussion, right?
Because if that's what you're expecting, you're going to be disappointed.
But I do believe there is a lot of things that you can get over time, just like
any partnership
or I talk a lot about like I call partnerships, even in my whole world, I call
them friendships,
just like your personal friendships.
And most people have a lot of Facebook LinkedIn connections.
They know a lot of people, their neighbors, their ecosystem around them that
are friends.
But you probably have very few best friends in your world.
And to get to that point, you're probably into similar things.
It takes effort.
And so I will quote someone at AWS who I think is awesome, but Carol Pots leads
like the
ISV sales team and early on.
I was like, how do you guys decide who you invest in?
Which partners are the most important you?
And I was expecting this metric, KPI, AWS, Amazon based answer.
She's like, oh, we invest in the partners and invest in us.
And I was like, wait, that sounds too easy.
But from not lens, it made a lot of sense.
It's like, I want to spend my time with the partners that understand our
business and are
able to help us achieve our goals.
That was many years ago and it's always stuck with me as an example.
But yeah, I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer.
But I think it depends on the founders, depends on the industry, depends on the
competitors.
It depends on where you are.
Truth be told, at lacework, when I started, I was like, who's our kind of
competitor?
And it was like, well, how are we?
Of course, when Paul Austin company, huge massive, and I was like, wow, they
have a massive
team and a massive partnership with AWS, Google and Microsoft.
Like I'm way behind.
I've had to go figure that out.
Why?
Because I'm aligned to sales.
And I didn't want to put my sellers in a disadvantage to not be able to sell
through the marketplace
and not be able to co-sell with AWS as an example.
So that's where we started.
These are excellent points.
And they all kind of back up the Y.
I want to make sure we didn't gloss over the fact that you said something
critical here,
which is like, you have to understand your Y or Y you're here.
In our prep call, we talked a little bit about this and it's something you
brought up.
I'd love for you to kind of talk through again in this lens, which is that you
often talk
to ISVs and your advisory capabilities are in your peer network.
And you always ask them why first.
Can you give some examples of like, what a good Y is?
Because we all understand some of the bad Ys and those expectations setting
that you brought
up.
And I think that those are fantastic.
What's a good Y?
I think everyone has experiences.
So what you're trying to do is connect a future that they don't understand to
the past of
their own personal experiences.
But if you don't understand, and a lot of times now, I'll call it a North Star,
where we're
trying to get to in two or three years, you're to understand kind of the past
or the culture
of the company or the business you're in or the competition you have or all of
this stuff.
I just landed here at astronomer, right?
Like, this company's been around for a few years.
We're a managed service built off of an open source, Apache Airflow project
that's turning
10 this year.
There's a massive community of 2,900 developers, millions of downloads a month.
I don't understand any of that, but someone here does.
So it's our co-founders, our CEO, our CRO.
Like I need to go figure out why this stuff exists and then try to apply what I
know now
that outcomes and the capabilities of partnering with the cloud and try to
connect these two
things together.
And then I do find that expectations is really the good and the bad, right?
Because if you're expecting unnatural things or things that are really hard to
do or I love
analogies, so I have always said, like, if the cloud or clouds are our solar
system and
AWS is our sun, then I want to be in Earth's position, right?
I want to be close enough to give the work, but not far enough to freeze.
But me expecting unnatural things is like changing gravity or me telling the
sun, like, hey,
I'm cold today.
Can you turn up the heat a little bit?
It's just not going to work.
So if your why is that, then that's okay.
But maybe the cloud isn't the partnership that we invested.
Maybe that's not the right go to market.
I can't even remember one conversation I had with the peer, but like, they
built awesome
SaaS software.
They were built in AWS and their customers were legal.
And so they're like, I want to go build a partnership with AWS.
And I was like, why?
I was like, who are your customers?
Law firms?
Like, do they have AWS?
Do they have committed spends?
Like, no, I was like, I'm to do that.
This didn't make any sense for your business and your universe.
There's much better partners that you should go find and build those
relationships with
that help you build pipeline, validate you, transact, whatever the answer is.
But it's just not this galaxy, right?
It's not this solar system.
It's another one for you.
In there, once you know the why, we have this cloud flywheel.
And so it's like, where you start in your flywheel could be different.
So at lacework, you started with marketplace and getting it operational and
transactable.
And then you went to co-sale where you start in the flywheel may also change
depending on
your why.
And depending on the resources, depending on the direction of the company.
And I think much like with tackle, we've been kind of learning this together,
right?
And also the sun keeps changing and moving around.
There isn't a right or wrong answer.
It really does depend on you and the forces that you're dealing with.
It's just kind of aligning that.
And honestly, today, I would say to anyone, the best place to align these wise
and figure
it out is when you're interviewing.
If what you know from your experiences and what's possible doesn't align to
what the company
wants, it's okay.
Maybe that's not the right place for you.
And so I think we think about that or even the conversations I'm having.
This is really important, but this other thing's really important.
And for now, you know, astronomer, awesome, already transactable in all three
marketplaces.
I can already co-sale with all three.
You kind of start with one, but I think you really need to do all three.
I think of this like football and the three phases of offense defense and
special teams.
Like you can absolutely have a great offense.
But if the other team scores more points than you do because you have a bad
defense, you
still lose at the end of the day.
So I think you need to think of the common a C's and I know we're ahead of that
direction
because that's kind of the framework that I think through.
So I'll leave it there.
The misconception, like what's one of the biggest misconceptions you've seen?
So we talked about setting expectations.
And I think in there is you find a lot of misconceptions.
So what's one of the biggest misconceptions you've seen around unlocking cloud
go to market
in the organizations that you've been a part of?
So it actually was an analogy this weekend because it was very true to me.
But I've used similar.
Well, I had some friends that I saw this weekend, like our best friends.
And they brought like three bags of like nectarines.
Last year, I know they got a few, but they didn't taste right, but this year
they were awesome.
The snazberries taste like snazberries.
They really want good choke.
But if you were to ask them, or if a business was asking me, like what kind of
revenue,
what kind of pipeline do we get?
What kind of nectarines do we get?
By the way, I want them now or I want them yesterday.
Like, that's an unnatural question to ask about your nectarine tree that you
just bought
as a seedling or just planted the seed.
And then what everyone kind of forgets in the middle is like to get three years
to have
these bags of nectarines, it wasn't like you just planted the seed and walked
away
and three years later, this thing happened.
You got out of it, what you put into it.
You watered it.
You fertilized it.
You did this.
And I think if you have the right people and the right strategy and the right
timeline,
maybe it takes two years instead of three.
Maybe it takes one year instead of three.
But I can't tell you if you're ever going to get nectarines.
I can't tell you how many you're going to actually harvest in two years, three
years
one year.
I mean, we could take this analogy all over the place, but it's really hard for
a CEO to
invest in partners or this line of business because it's the long tail of your
business.
And when they decide to spend a dollar with me or my team, I'm deciding to not
spend that
dollar in engineering, writing code and not spend that dollar on my sales team
hiring
a seller.
They're betting on the future games.
So it's like, how do I scale my future sales team?
How do I scale my future pipeline?
Who's got millions of customers and like that kind of influence and reach very
few people?
The sun has very few competitors in our solar system.
It's pretty powerful.
Can you imagine if that sun gave us a more, like invited us to their podcast,
like gave
us a bunch of like gifts to go grow or go to market or expand our marketing
budget or did
things to help us again, awesome analogy too.
It's like meeting a new neighbor and the first thing out of your mouth like, hi
, nice to meet
you.
Michael, can I borrow your lawn boar?
That would just be really weird.
That relationship is destined for like a really awkward time forever because
you just
met someone you're asking them for pipeline, gifts, access.
That's probably not going to happen and no one wants to spend their time with
that person.
Now I can go to my best friend and be like, hey, can I borrow your lawn boar?
But that's a natural thing.
We've been friends for 10 years.
So I think all of these things come into play from your personal and like
joking life
to like, this is business and here's partnerships.
Now that we know our why, we kind of figured out how we're going to start,
where in the
firewall we're going to start that aligns to helping meet the momentum going
around our
why.
You have two additional C's.
So we talk about co style, co market, co build and you kind of have two
additional C's.
I'd love for you to share with the audience your C's.
We've got them in our maturity model, but I love that you kind of just pulled
them out
and brought them front and center and said, there's five C's.
I think the ones that people forget is consumption and there's two areas of
consumption.
Number one, it's much easier to be a friend of the cloud.
The more I spend, let's just be honest, right?
And there's more easy to kind of talk about better together and co build and
all these
levers, the more I commit, the more I spend.
But there's another one that people don't think about.
We call it drag.
It turns out like my technology today is data orchestration and ETL and
pipeline data pipelines.
So in this case, I'm like an air traffic controller kind of moving planes in
order sequence land
here at this time.
What's this thing moves?
Go to your gate.
Then this thing comes in like we're sequencing all of the stuff, but the
reality is I'm taking
data from one place and I'm moving data to another place.
And the reality is when I'm moving that stuff around, maybe I'm moving it into
redshift.
That's a pretty important service rate of yes, I'm staging stuff in S3.
That's pretty important.
I'm driving consumption and compute.
If you can figure out that drag like what do you do and how is it affecting the
customers
spend or the outcomes that the customers trying to get to grow revenue, reduce
costs, whenever
your value drivers you're attaching to, you need to connect to your technology
to that.
And not all fits under the C for consumption.
The last C I've already said it in different ways for insolving friends and I
call it champions,
which a lot of sales playbooks do.
People have a choice in who they spend time with, how much time they spend with
them, what
they offer them.
People are going to spend their time with people they like that understand what
's important
to them, their KPIs, their goals and obviously they're contributing to their
own company's
revenue success of their own personal metrics and so I just call friends
helping friends,
but that sees for champions.
You can bucket those two last C's under like goodness, right?
I've got a good story for my consumption and I'm a good person and I want to
work with
you.
But it has to be authentic.
I've met a lot of people that I can see from a mile away with their up to and
it just
doesn't feel authentic, right?
So you can't fake it and it takes time, right?
You can't rush it either.
There's some tricks that I could do maybe to get those nectarines a year or two
earlier,
like it doesn't happen overnight because trust takes time, takes a very short,
stupid time
to break it.
So you got to be careful too and you got to think about the ongoing care and
feeding.
What if I stop watering that nectarine tree tomorrow?
I get no more nectarines like you just broke your partnership.
So you have to care and feed it.
I think we've just added a sixth C there for your consistency at the end there,
right?
Oh, I've got a lot more trust me.
I can add like 10, but I think you have to at some point just say like there's
too many.
How you use this though, it's funny.
Like my team's still to this day, even when we're talking with our partners, we
talk to them
through these C's.
Every decision we make, we're trying to map like what C's does this thing
bucket?
So it's turned into actionable strategy.
Turns out it's the lens that your partner is measuring you through.
So I guess it's okay, but also like when you're doing stuff, it helps to kind
of map it
back to like, why are we doing this?
Where does it fit?
And a lot of times the best things are when you're combining them together and
I'll give you
an example.
I've built this integration with some service that now we're writing a blog and
we're going
to go market that blog and we're going to generate pipeline that we're going to
co-sell.
That's how you put this stuff together.
You've got co-sell co-build co-market, but the other C's you're talking about.
Are the attributes or factors that can really accelerate the experience in
those carrying,
champions, consistency are all like key attributes that can affect your co-beld
, your co-sell,
and your cloud go to market?
Michael, as you look at your kind of your framework of C's here, as you're
taking on a large
undertaking with now taking on astronomer and looking at how you're going to
continue
to grow them, you've got a lot of expertise through your advisement with Caddy
Shack and
you've seen a lot change over the last few years.
What trends do you see looking forward that are shaping kind of the future of
this space
for your role and for these partnerships?
Is there anything that stands out as a trend to you and something that we
should all
keep our eye on?
I think it comes back to all the discussions we've had.
Is it going to be different for each company and each industry and each leader
and all
of that?
But I do think that it's not going away and I'd commonly will joke like AWS is
telling
me they're 85% of the world's workloads are still not in a public cloud.
So like, wow, there's a long way to go.
It feels like some of us have been doing this for five or ten years.
No tackles been around for a long time, but it's still maturing and the
variables the target
keeps kind of moving around or about.
So there isn't a one word or right or wrong answer, but I think the secret here
is in kind
of this discussion and the hard part is and I make no forms about this.
This cloud partnership isn't for everyone and I'll quote my Caddy Shack partner
that
he says just by being in a marketplace is like being a product in the largest
wall market
in the US.
It doesn't mean that anyone is buying it.
It doesn't mean anyone finds it and wrote 37 on the bottom shelf in the back.
You still have to go do something with it.
But if your business and your customers are pulling you this way, if there's
gravity,
that makes a lot of sense.
So I think it depends on what your North Star is, your why, but I do still
fundamentally
believe that it's still early.
It's maturing.
So now everyone's doing it.
So sometimes by competition, you have to figure it out in it.
You shouldn't corporate it in your business, but it's not easy either.
And so your expectations and what you want out of it and what you put into it
is always
going to be a decision that a business has to make.
I picture like an Instagram video of like someone walking through Walmart.
Like let me come show you where our product is and like why it's so amazing and
then you
have to go buy it.
And then when it changes shelves, let me go tell you where we are now.
And like it's over here now, right?
You've got to put in all of that extra go to marketing around getting that
product out
to the market.
And like my football analogy, many teams have an offensive offense and the
other team just
scores more points and you lose.
So like nobody wants to lose, right?
Or on that Chargers fan, I don't like to admit this, but like they've had years
of like
terrible special teams.
So it's like you've lost games because the function that is probably less
important than
offense and defense has lost games for you.
And so the thing about the three C's is like if you're just doing co-sell all
the time
and you never think about the co-building or the co-innovation and like that's
the sticky
stuff, but it's really hard.
Someone's writing code, right?
Or you never actually connected it to pipeline or the marketing funds or the
programs.
Like you're just missing a part of the game.
So I think balance is the other.
It's there, but you get out of any partnership, which you put into it and these
kind of understanding
your partner and balancing that, I think that's kind of the home run.
How do you stay flexible?
Because like the clouds are always like this is always changing.
It's always evolving.
You know, what advice do you have for a cloud alliance leader who's newer in
this role
to like stay flexible, keep up with the ever-enchanging environment that they
're now in?
I think probably like you through my career.
I didn't know that I wanted to do this job, but I just knew other things.
And I think for every job that I wanted that I wasn't doing, I would find
people who
were doing that job and I would ask them questions.
Or I would find what they're doing to learn.
I would more or less put myself in a position to do that job before I've ever
done that job.
And I think hiring managers always want to see that.
So I actually had someone last week ask me the same questions like, Hey, I'm
doing this
in the company, but I've always been curious about your world.
Like what could I do to get started?
I was like, Well, there's podcasts like this.
I have a podcast.
There's groups.
There's LinkedIn stuff.
There's assets.
None of that stuff really existed five years ago.
So if I wanted to get into this space, I would start with like trying to learn
as much as
I could from those and others that are already doing it.
And I think that's kind of the answer.
Because that opportunity may or may not present itself, but you kind of said
your own
more star and you figure out what do I need to know to put myself into a
position.
So I commonly refer my favorite definition, mine or someone that I heard of the
word lock
was when prior preparation meets opportunity.
And so like a lot of people see like, Oh, yeah, I bought a lottery ticket and I
won.
Okay, I guess that's lucky.
But you know, most people are preparing for their own destiny through education
, learning,
partnerships, friends, whatever.
And then the opportunity opens themselves up to go like execute.
And so that others might look at that.
It's being lucky, but you're the one that put in that grind for years to get
yourself
to position for that opportunity.
I love that you found friendships inside of tackle that you have built at least
works
and you're continuing to partner with us and allow your friends to tackle to
help you
now at astronomer.
Yeah, that's one of my secret weapons, right?
In the beginning, I said this, you guys interact.
I was one company team of one, but you had already sold and had a bunch of
customers.
So one, I met a lot of your customers.
I asked them how they were doing.
My sales team, Brian Bidill is out there somewhere in the ether.
Like he was awesome.
He was a consultant, right?
He wasn't selling to us.
He was trying to figure out where we were, where we wanted to go, how tackle
could help.
I think that was like really awesome.
So even getting on board it, a lot of the folks are still at tackle some or not
Like they all had experiences onboarding other customers and other marketplaces
or co-sells.
So I would just ask them a ton of questions.
They were a wealth of conversation about like what did that company do?
Or like this is where we are and what our business does.
Like what do you recommend that we do?
I still never call you guys a vendor.
You've always been a partner to our business, right?
Like we could do this, but we do it better and faster because of tackle.
I give you money in exchange for services, but we've always been kind of a
partner on this
journey.
So I'm super appreciative to you both and, you know, John and Brian and Dylan
and everyone
dog, everyone, not over the years.
I know we didn't have you for too long.
So I do want to respect your time, but thank you for being so gracious with it.
It was very insightful for us.
We were lucky to have you as a partner and an ally.
You've done a lot for tackle and when we certainly hope to continue to support
you all
and especially in your new journey, Michael.
So thanks for being a good repeat customer.
But for our listeners, if you want to learn more about Michael, you can check
out his LinkedIn,
Aaron and the final thoughts.
Yeah, I just want to say thanks again, Michael, for coming on and sharing your
experiences
over the last, you know, five or so years in this space of cloud go to market.
You've got so many great lessons learned and thank you for participating.
Not just being a consumer of the community, but also contributing to the
community and
all that you do.
Happy to and I think you guys I learned by helping others too because then I
learned something,
some angle, something that I didn't think of.
So I've realized giving back is actually a unique way for me to validate the
lessons I've
learned or learned something that I didn't even consider because this stuff
does keep
changing.
So thank you for having me.
I do appreciate it.
And obviously thanks to tackle and the whole team.
It's been an awesome five year journey, you guys.
Oh my gosh, that was such a great conversation.
I could have talked to him longer on, especially some of those analogies that
he had.
I was like, I could get kept going and kept building on them.
I know he's a super busy guy.
So he gave us a lot of his time and we appreciate it.
He does a lot for tackle, but there's so much to unpack there.
Aaron, I know you saw you take notes a couple times and can you tell me what
are some of
the top things that you took away from that conversation?
I had my own aha moment in listening to and having this conversation with him
around cloud alliance leaders, like really good cloud alliance leaders or
entrepreneurs at heart.
And I think that that has really resonated with me as an entrepreneur and why I
have loved
the space for over 10 plus years is the opportunity to work closely with other
like-minded
individuals, many entrepreneurs inside of these organizations trying to build
their business
inside their business.
And I've just really gravitated towards that.
I was like, oh my gosh, yes, like these are my people.
Yeah, you do see that.
I never heard that before, but as soon as he said that, I was like, yes, that's
right.
And he was like, and partnerships are more like friendships.
And when I think about my circle of people in my network and the customers that
I've
worked with, most of my customers do turn into friendships like inside of work
and outside
of work.
That's not a big space.
Everybody thinks I go, we throw around all the numbers of the cloud providers
and we see
the thousands of sales reps, but like the community, the ISV community, the
advisors, those
who like to share those alliance leaders, like it's really small.
Yeah.
And that growth mindset just keeps coming back, right?
You have to have a growth mindset around cloud go to market because it's a
challenge and
it's a puzzle that you have to unlock and it's going to constantly have
changing pieces.
And you have a new puzzle to figure out inside of there to continue to grow and
unlock doing
more business with your cloud partnership.
Yeah.
And without that, I mean, you're going to get pretty stagnant, pretty fast
because the
cloud providers are coming out with updates all the time and we'll be changing
to the agency
model and AWS rolling out new ways to send private offers like all these things
change constantly.
So you need to have that mindset to evolve to a good point.
I always thought about it as like it takes an at like some a little bit of the
characteristics
of this role as an athlete, right?
Like an athlete knows like you have goals, but you're always competing against
yourself.
You always have to kind of like keep training, keep going out there and trying
to do better
and get better.
And as athletes, like we deal with like losses and defeats and we have to pick
ourselves
back up and like keep going, right?
So I think it's like that entrepreneurial meets an athlete, boom, cloud
alliance leader.
Yeah.
And then run it on that flywheel.
I'm so glad you made that connection.
That was a great connection.
Well, I really hope our listeners enjoyed this conversation with Michael just
as much as
we did.
I'm so fortunate to like get to know him more through this tackle experience.
Love that we built that friendship at Lasork.
He continues to take that friendship to strontomer and into wherever he goes
next.
Thank you everyone for watching and listening to this week's episode of unlock
cloud go to
market.
I'm your co-host Aaron Feiger.
And I'm co-host Patrick Riley.
Until next week.
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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