Embark on a transformative journey with us as Peter Hancock unravels the secrets behind Asimily's strategic pivot from direct to channel partner sales, a move that has revolutionized their global market presence. With Peter's vast experience, including his tenure at Symantec, he brings to light the critical role of executive backing in such a bold transition. We talk about crafting and ecosystem building, addressing the complex issues customers face in the realm of cybersecurity for connected devices.
As we navigate the intricacies of channel program development, Peter lays bare the approaches that have spurred exponential growth. He shares the ins and outs of implementing deal registration, margin programs, and the adaptation of sales strategies that resonate globally. The conversation takes a deep look at how Asimily values the contributions of its partners, recognizing them through initiatives like the founding members program, and emphasizes the importance of listening to partner feedback to refine the sales process, making it a mutually beneficial journey for the company and its partners.
Our episode closes by exploring the art of nurturing robust channel partnerships, where trust and respect for a partner's brand reign supreme. With Peter's guidance, we dissect the nuances of sales team education on the dynamics of partnerships, and how competition can be a catalyst for growth through strategic programs. We also touch on the future direction of Asimily's channel program and the keys to forging successful relationships that pave the way for achievement. Join us as we share wisdom from a distinguished channel sales veteran and celebrate the milestones that define a successful channel partner program.
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Until next time 👋
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Peter Hancock: So we're really leveraging not just the company
00:00:03
brand but the channel and which partner can help open up the
00:00:06
doors for us.
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So I don't think it's normal I absolutely don't think it's
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normal to do what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months
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and flip the company from a direct selling motion to
00:00:18
indirect and have so much channel focus.
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I think it's actually should be , should have taken three years
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to get where we are today, but we've got great support from the
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executive team, from our CEO.
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The partners like what they hear.
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They see that they can make money with us and we do.
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We have worked really hard on building our story and our
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differentiation and that's what matters, Because at the end of
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the day, the customer says I know I have this problem, Now do
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I?
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I want to go ahead and address it, and that's where the partner
00:00:45
comes in.
00:00:51
Maciej: Hello, welcome and thank you for tuning in to Channel
00:00:54
Voices, the podcast for future channel leaders, where we learn
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the ins and outs of partner ecosystems through casual
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conversations with channel professionals from a variety of
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industries, partner types and geographies.
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My name is Maciek and I'm your host, peter Hancock.
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Welcome to Channel Voices, thank you very much.
00:01:19
Peter Hancock: I appreciate being here today.
00:01:22
Maciej: Thank you so much for joining me for this episode.
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As we kick things off, would you mind just telling us a
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little bit about your channel background and your current role
00:01:32
at Asimily?
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Peter Hancock: Yeah, so my channel.
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So again, peter Hancock, I've been with Asimily for about a
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year and a half.
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My channel background is really someone who has lived either at
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the OEMs or with channel partners over the years and
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really look at the channel as the multiplier effect, whether I
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was with Symantec back in the day and we worked with our
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channel partners on the consulting and service side, or
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my most recent spend of time prior to coming to Asimily,
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whereas with a large services and solution provider in the US.
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What I really looked at is how does the channel represent and
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really become the advocate of the vendors, of the OEMs, but
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really listen to the voice of the customer and what problems
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are the customer trying to solve ?
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And when you build out a channel program that is really
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focused on making the partner successful with their customers,
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then you're in a really good place.
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And the short version of the story, which I'm sure we'll dive
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into more here, is that when I got the opportunity to come to
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Asimily last year, 18 months ago or so, we were building a
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channel partner program from scratch.
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We had sold the entirety of the company 100% direct.
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So within the last 18 months we've moved from 100% direct to
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100% indirect.
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Over the last 14 months or so, I was leading the partner
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program in our channel across the globe.
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We have approximately our channel across the globe.
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We have approximately 20 partners across the US, saudi
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Arabia, germany, europe and Australia, and now I'm the CRO
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and in charge of all global sales and our go-to-market
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strategies.
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Maciej: Great introduction, thank you for that.
00:03:20
So you mentioned when you came over to, to Asimily, that was
00:03:24
all kind of direct sales and you had to bring in the, the
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channel into into play and extend that sales um, that sales
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team, I suppose and reach more, reach more prospects, reach
00:03:39
more customers, right?
00:03:40
So how was the journey of launching Asimily's first
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channel program?
00:03:47
Peter Hancock: It was only possible because we had
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executive support.
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Our CEO and our CRO at the time 100% were on board for the
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channel we had been really building out, Asimily to be
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focused on customer experience and solving complex needs that
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not everyone understands today the world, the landscape, the
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Internet, I think, and what kind of security holes it introduces
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to the world.
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So one you have to be aware of a problem, you have to educate
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your customers, you have to educate the partners that this
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is actually something that is going to cause could cause more
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potential security compromises in the world to citizens,
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patients, humans and kind of just overall the experiences
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that people have whether they're at home at their own hospital,
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whether they're in the city or a transportation center.
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So the education part was a big piece to say what is the
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problem that we're solving today .
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The next piece of it is I had to kind of go into it with eyes
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wide open and I had been at a partner for the previous four
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years and I also knew through my days at Symantec or ForgeRock
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or my previous company where I had been able to see my network
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spread out.
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So, as we all do over the course of our lifetime, you work
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with the people that you like and you work with the people you
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trust.
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When I was coming over here, I came over to a company that was
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very focused on selling direct through their network but
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realized that's only going to go so far.
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You can only grow so far, so fast.
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Great customer install base, incredible technology, really an
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engineering-led company for the first seven years or so.
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And now it was how do we shift this go-to-market so we can have
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rapid explosion?
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Because our competitors are growing at tens of 20s of
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hundreds of factors every year and we are primed for that as
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well.
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So let's get us in a place to say we're going to go 10X, 20x,
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100x, and that's where we got started.
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So we went from.
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What is the concept of deal registration, margin programs?
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Are we going to be comp neutral ?
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Are we going to be a prop?
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Are we going to be a margin-based program?
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Are we going to be a margin-based program?
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We're going to be a discount-based program?
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How does that differ in the us versus germany, versus saudi
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arabia?
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Where do we have reseller agreements in place?
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All of it.
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If you can imagine anyone listening to this podcast, if
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you've walked into a channel, it's completely built.
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You'd kind of take it for granted.
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But as you get to be at the forefront of it, it's really
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kind of fun and exciting.
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It's a lot of work.
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You're going through a lot of contract, a lot of process, and
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you're taking an existing sales team and recruiting an existing
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sales team to say you're going to get a whole lot more help now
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because we are going to go to our channel partners, our
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resellers and, for us, eventually, managed service
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providers, help be that multiplier effect, be that
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trumpet that just kind of gets the noise out there and gets the
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message out.
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There is probably a better way of saying that.
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And it was fun.
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It was a lot of fun.
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I was able to bring on someone for North America.
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She and I had worked together in a previous life and my
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promise to her was you get to build something from scratch.
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You've been in the channel for, let's call it, 20 years.
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You've always inherited the program.
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What if you could build the program from scratch?
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And that was intriguing enough to say let's come on over.
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Same conversation with a gentleman that runs EMEA for us.
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He's based in the uk and he's built out channel programs in
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the past.
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He's always kind of had oversight as to what they wanted
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and how they wanted it.
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For us it was here's your landscape who are the partners
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that you want to go after, who are they distribute the
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value-added distributors, value-added resellers and who
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are the?
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Who are those partners that are actually going to make an
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impact for us?
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And he was also able to do that .
00:07:46
So today we have and I had a big boss of Yetis over here just
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a few minutes ago.
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We have what we call our founding members program and our
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founding members program is the first sales team, so account
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exec and sales engineer and potentially channel manager, if
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that person is part of that sales cycle that we consider our
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founding members Because we know that, as you're bringing in
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not a startup technology, we're not a startup technology.
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We've been around a long time.
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But it is a newer technology.
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It's a newer part of the threat landscape that not all CISOs
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are aware of.
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You are now a founding member of our success and we appreciate
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you for that, and that's kind of one of the unique things that
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we're doing differently is to really appreciate what our
00:08:34
partners are doing for us as a company and at the same time
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thinking about where else can we leverage their expertise, their
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skills.
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There's been more than a few partners who said your quoting
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system doesn't quite work for us .
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It seems like it's built for more of a direct will help you.
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And we've got on a session.
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We've looked, they shared with how they would build a quote out
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.
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We pivoted and we fill a quote.
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So for we use this example a lot.
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I know it's more of a US-centric example, but in the
00:09:05
movie the Nike Air movie they talk about Michael Jordan and,
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for those that are familiar, they talk about building a shoe
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around the player.
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They talk about a shoe is just a shoe until my stun steps into
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it.
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It's the Mrs Jordan quote at the very end.
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So we were kind of going through our program and we
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wanted to have a unique name.
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We wanted to really think about something that CRM has not had
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anyone else registered and that's where we came up with the
00:09:32
program launch.
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So we use a lot of rocket ship and a lot of semi-sonic,
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supersonic in our language.
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But we also use the fact that we've built the program around
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the partner and even last week we were going through something
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and the partner said this is a little awkward in the flow,
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here's how we do it.
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We were able to take that, incorporate that back in and now
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we've got a much more efficient sales process as far as the
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close.
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And so now that we've got invoices and POs and we
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understand how they invoice their customer, we can actually
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pivot just a little bit and say we can be much more efficient
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and be a better partner to you.
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And I think for anyone that's been in sales for any amount of
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time, they know you got to make the sales cycle easy.
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You got to make it efficient, don't make it hard.
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Sales reps don't want to make it hard.
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Sales reps don't want to live in salesforce, they don't want
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to live in hubspot.
00:10:27
They want to be out with the customers.
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They want to be able to sell, and the more that we can do this
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head the program.
00:10:32
Support them, be successful and go make money.
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That's what we're doing.
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Maciej: I'm I'm glad to hear that, hey, you listen to your
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partners and you listen really intentionally and you
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incorporate that feedback and can make adjustments as they
00:10:49
make sense.
00:10:50
Obviously, what were some of those, I suppose, decisions that
00:10:53
you made when you were designing that channel program,
00:10:56
because obviously channel programs evolve right, but when
00:10:59
you start, what were some of those most critical decisions
00:11:03
that you had to make?
00:11:04
Peter Hancock: The first one I walked into, which was folks
00:11:07
were going from 100% direct to 100% indirect and what that
00:11:13
meant is education of a few of the account executives who had
00:11:18
been here in the past.
00:11:19
It also meant the departure of one because they could not
00:11:24
comprehend.
00:11:24
They could not comprehend how to work with a partner and
00:11:27
actually riled against the system and probably caused us
00:11:30
more grief than anything else.
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Eventually it could cause us brand damage if we kind of let
00:11:34
that reside.
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The next piece of it was really how do you work with a channel
00:11:40
partner?
00:11:40
How do you bring in a partner who is really?
00:11:44
They either can get a meeting with a CISO, they have paper or
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they have either done one transaction or millions of
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dollars of transactions with this customer over the years.
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So they trust and the partner usually a partner account
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executive owns that trust and by opening us into that world,
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into their world, they're extending that trust.
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They're extending that trust and everything we do when we
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engage with a partner and they're selling and we're now on
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board with customers, is to make sure that their brand is
00:12:20
extended into what we do.
00:12:22
So every deal that we've done with the partner over the last
00:12:25
year and we've done the onboarding.
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We make sure that the partner stays engaged, that they're
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aware of, aware of what the next steps.
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We had a deal two or three weeks ago where, in just
00:12:36
speaking with a customer, he said I like everything I've seen
00:12:39
.
00:12:39
I want more.
00:12:40
And that partner was able to expedite the sales process
00:12:43
within two weeks in order to help us close within the month,
00:12:48
which is fantastic because it gives us more revenue for that
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month.
00:12:51
So that's the education of the sales team as to what does this
00:12:56
all mean to them, because they just weren't in that cycle
00:12:59
before and that's a little bit of the startup mode that we were
00:13:02
in 18 months ago.
00:13:04
Where we are today came out of the gate strong with a
00:13:07
competitive margin program.
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We made the decision to be comp neutral.
00:13:12
Competitive margin program we made the decision to be comp
00:13:15
neutral.
00:13:15
So for any of our reps out there today, the margin doesn't
00:13:18
hurt them, and that was a big decision.
00:13:21
That was a financial decision that we had to make, but also
00:13:24
very well received by our partners.
00:13:25
And then we went through a competitive takeout program.
00:13:29
So we are offering a much greater margin to our partners.
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If they can actually help facilitate and help drive
00:13:37
competitive takeout.
00:13:38
That's where you can always go after as well.
00:13:43
Then it came to kind of having a public face.
00:13:46
So what is the name of this program, what's the brand,
00:13:49
what's the website, what's deal, registration, all the other
00:13:51
mechanics that you would normally see.
00:13:52
Hiring Wayne and Diana that was two more people.
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We actually have a third person starting on Monday, so we'd
00:13:59
have a second person starting on the West Coast.
00:14:02
So Priya starts on Monday.
00:14:03
And then we've engaged with a few partners in Australia who
00:14:08
are really going to be our real first feet on the ground and
00:14:12
we've got a few factors, I feel like, over in Australia.
00:14:14
So those are kind of all the different moving parts that you
00:14:18
could imagine.
00:14:18
Maciej: I've been in situations.
00:14:19
I've been in companies where a rep was told that you know, from
00:14:25
now on you're going to be working with partners.
00:14:27
For some it was a no-brainer Either they were just very
00:14:31
clever and understood the concept and how it can help them
00:14:35
drive their own sales.
00:14:36
Or there was that moment where, no, I don't understand this,
00:14:41
and why is there margins and why is my deal not worth as much as
00:14:44
it used to be?
00:14:45
And I'm out basically.
00:14:47
So yeah, I've been in those situations and try to you know
00:14:51
as much as I could at that time educate my reps in the team on
00:14:56
how that really works.
00:14:57
But it really everything starts with that relationship building
00:15:04
, right?
00:15:05
So with that in mind and you know how you structured your
00:15:08
program, which seems it's very collaborative with the partners,
00:15:12
right, Like, was it very hard to get off the ground?
00:15:17
Is that something that you consciously have decided to
00:15:19
collaborate with the partners to create that program, or is that
00:15:24
something that just came out in the wash?
00:15:25
That's a great question I.
00:15:27
Peter Hancock: I think there's a couple times we ran into the
00:15:29
wall and broke our nose and realized, hey, we're doing this
00:15:34
the hard way, so let's kind of think about this.
00:15:37
We've all been doing this for a few years.
00:15:42
Let's just call it that Be kind to our age.
00:15:44
Right now we have colleagues, allies, people we've worked with
00:15:48
, people we've been in the trenches with, who are spread
00:15:51
out throughout the world that we live in and they're more than
00:15:55
happy to help us out, because we'll help them out.
00:15:57
I think reciprocity and those relationships matter at the end
00:16:01
of the day.
00:16:02
I will tell you that as we were building out our quoting system
00:16:05
last July, we realized that it was a really direct base.
00:16:10
It had not incorporated margin.
00:16:12
It wasn't very intuitive.
00:16:13
We were seeing mistakes come back when partners were quoting
00:16:17
to customers.
00:16:17
We took a pause and said, okay, who do we know operationally as
00:16:21
some of our partners let's call them up, I'm just giving
00:16:25
feedback and said here's our quote how would you enter this
00:16:27
into the system?
00:16:28
We entered it in and we saw how they did it.
00:16:30
There's a few mistakes here.
00:16:33
There's room for improvement here.
00:16:35
So that piece of it was a just realizing that we weren't
00:16:41
exactly where we needed to be.
00:16:42
So we took the feedback and we've made it better and it's
00:16:48
been a better experience, better selling process with that
00:16:50
partner, and all the others have benefited as well.
00:16:51
That's been a better experience , better selling process with
00:16:53
that partner, and all the others have benefited as well, so
00:16:54
that's been a fantastic piece.
00:16:57
I think the other two elements that I would say that were one
00:17:02
react and two proactive.
00:17:04
I'll talk about proactive for a second.
00:17:05
It's really mapping the customer journey.
00:17:08
We are like you said, we're in a newer space.
00:17:12
We are like we said, we're in a newer space and the customer
00:17:14
journey is one where the security leader has to be aware
00:17:19
that this actually could be a problem for him or her and they
00:17:23
need a little bit of education.
00:17:24
And the buying cycles vary from industry to industry.
00:17:28
Whether you're in healthcare, you're a city.
00:17:31
You do a lot with smart cities, smart buildings.
00:17:35
So all those cameras and badge readers and TVs and traffic
00:17:40
signals and water control systems that are in the cities
00:17:44
today or even on college campuses, those are different
00:17:48
kind of buyers and we've learned that each partner has kind of
00:17:53
has different kinds of relationships to those different
00:17:55
buyers and, for example, yesterday we hosted a webcast
00:18:01
podcast to to the U S for smart city, smart building and for
00:18:08
transportation through our partner, and our partner has the
00:18:13
contract and all the elements in place that we need to do the
00:18:16
transaction, but they also have that customer list.
00:18:19
Yeah, we also did the same thing with it.
00:18:22
We're doing the same thing with a partner in switzerland too,
00:18:25
where they've got.
00:18:26
They've got relationships where they can bring us in the door.
00:18:28
They just need a little bit of education.
00:18:30
So, as we're looking at how do we truly scale the larger firms
00:18:35
some of the distribution firms have their own inside sales
00:18:38
teams that we are now really working to educate and leverage
00:18:43
to help drive conversations and deals and we're finding now, a
00:18:47
year and a half into our channel program, that the most
00:18:51
effective thing that we're doing are these webinars, are these
00:18:54
kind of call campaigns where a year ago we wouldn't have been
00:19:00
able to pull that off.
00:19:01
We just had too much on our plate.
00:19:03
But now the problem is understood much better by the
00:19:06
industry and we're now putting a lot more thought leadership
00:19:12
content out there.
00:19:13
So our marketing team has done a fantastic job of really
00:19:16
driving thought leadership and getting us in front of the right
00:19:20
conferences and getting on.
00:19:21
That is kind of driven by feedback from the partners.
00:19:39
Maciej: Have you ever been working in such an environment,
00:19:43
in such a situation?
00:19:44
If yes, could you elaborate a little bit?
00:19:49
And if not, how does that compare to the other channel
00:19:54
programs that you've been working within?
00:19:56
Peter Hancock: I'd say I've got kind of two parts to that
00:19:59
question.
00:20:00
The first was my previous life, before Asimily.
00:20:05
I was in a position to work with a lot of startups and
00:20:10
companies that weren't the mega, not the CrowdStrike, not the
00:20:15
follow-up.
00:20:15
I mean, we worked with them too and they were number one,
00:20:18
number two, number three of our partners right, hundreds of
00:20:20
dollars.
00:20:20
But we also had all these other companies where you knew that
00:20:24
they had value.
00:20:25
They were differentiated but they really needed help with
00:20:28
their messaging or they really needed help kind of doing a
00:20:30
proof of concept or their sales cycles messaging, or they really
00:20:33
needed help kind of doing a proof of concept or their sales
00:20:36
cycles.
00:20:36
And every once in a while you get a.
00:20:37
You get a phone call from a pre , from a colleague saying, hey,
00:20:39
I joined this new company.
00:20:40
It's really cool, get me on your line card.
00:20:43
Okay, that's really cool, but are you the same as the 40 other
00:20:47
vendors in your space either?
00:20:49
What are you doing different?
00:20:50
And there was one or two um, and I think of one.
00:20:55
It was a really cool kind of like honeypot technology and the
00:21:00
this.
00:21:01
The head of sales and I were friends from a previous life and
00:21:05
we got to meet at rsa a few different times and kind of just
00:21:08
walk through what is the buyer journey, what is the customer's
00:21:12
experience?
00:21:13
How do they make money?
00:21:14
He was really kind of open with us and then we started to be
00:21:18
able to go on to join customers together and that's where all
00:21:22
the magic happens.
00:21:23
I think anyone who's ever sold through the channel knows that
00:21:26
at the end of the day, it's seller to seller, it's seller to
00:21:30
seller.
00:21:31
We get along, we like each other, we're going to do some
00:21:34
good things together and the customer trusts me as the
00:21:37
partner.
00:21:37
So if I bring you in, you better not screw up, and that's
00:21:43
what I witnessed.
00:21:44
That's the takeaway.
00:21:45
One of the biggest takeaways I had from my last four years is
00:21:49
that the really most successful companies that we were able to
00:21:52
onboard were the ones that wanted to work with us, could
00:21:56
absolutely tell the differentiation, tell their
00:21:58
story, and that's what we're doing here is we are now.
00:22:01
I'm now.
00:22:02
I'm in those shoes and I'm going to my former colleagues,
00:22:05
my friends, and saying, hey, we've got something really cool
00:22:08
and differentiated here, and for some I it took me a year to go
00:22:13
address, because I know once I open, knock on that door, that
00:22:16
person is going to open us up to 20, 30 accounts and we were
00:22:21
probably just kind of getting our feet underneath as far as
00:22:24
getting wins in the channel.
00:22:27
Our WinWire program is really starting to take off.
00:22:30
Our channel program is really starting to get some recognition
00:22:35
.
00:22:35
We've been on planes pretty much 50 weeks out of last year
00:22:39
getting around to different sales kickoffs and different
00:22:42
conferences.
00:22:43
We actually just finished one in Germany this week.
00:22:46
We've got Saudi Arabia in two or three weeks, the Gulf
00:22:50
Information Security Conference.
00:22:51
One of the large 40 people I think will be there.
00:22:54
So we're really kind of leveraging not just the company
00:22:57
brand but the channel and which partner can help open up the
00:23:01
doors for us.
00:23:01
So I don't think it's normal I absolutely don't think it's
00:23:05
normal to do what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months
00:23:09
and flip the company from a direct selling motion to
00:23:12
indirect and have so much channel focus.
00:23:15
I think it actually should have taken three years to get where
00:23:19
we are today.
00:23:19
But we've got great support from the executive team, from
00:23:23
our CEO.
00:23:24
The partners like what they hear .
00:23:25
They see that they can make money with us and we have worked
00:23:28
really hard on building our story and our differentiation
00:23:32
and that's what matters.
00:23:32
Matters because at the end of the day, the customer says I
00:23:35
know I have this problem, now do I want to go go ahead and
00:23:38
address it?
00:23:38
And that's where the partner comes in.
00:23:39
Um, for example, we were on a call it was yesterday um
00:23:44
customer, I was kind of comparing apple, you know us, us
00:23:48
to our competitor, apples to you know, oranges, maybe, maybe
00:23:52
green apples to red apples, and it came down to okay, you're
00:23:57
trying to compare everything Asimily does to their competitor
00:24:01
, what's really important to you .
00:24:04
And that's a conversation we, being new to the CISO, could
00:24:08
have had.
00:24:08
The partner's been working with them for five years, so they
00:24:11
were able to call in and say okay, let's go have lunch, let's
00:24:15
go, let's go have a coffee, let's talk about what's really
00:24:18
important to you.
00:24:19
That partner was able to come back to us and say here's the
00:24:23
three things you need to go figure out and go message to
00:24:27
this prospect, okay, and you'll be closer to winning this deal.
00:24:30
And when we see that time and time again, then you get
00:24:34
believers in your sales reps and then, at the end of the day,
00:24:40
they really start to drive the story and they start to drive
00:24:43
the success.
00:24:44
Maciej: Excellent.
00:24:44
So you listen to your partner's feedback.
00:24:47
That quoting example that you have given is really good.
00:24:52
But obviously every partner is going to have different needs.
00:24:56
They will give you feedback that might contradict with
00:25:00
another partner's feedback.
00:25:02
So how do you balance the need for that consistency and
00:25:08
standardization within your channel program but still kind
00:25:12
of maintaining that flexibility that's required to accommodate
00:25:17
partners' needs?
00:25:19
Peter Hancock: We did something very specific last year.
00:25:21
One, because it's a bandwidth right.
00:25:23
When I first got on board it was just me, and then we fired
00:25:26
Diana, then we hired Wayne and now Priya starts Monday.
00:25:28
So we're building out the team.
00:25:31
We also didn't go out and get 300 partners.
00:25:34
We didn't go out there and say we're going to build, launch and
00:25:38
we're going to have semi-sonic and supersonic or gold, platinum
00:25:41
, silver I'm not a big fan of the metals status.
00:25:45
We're going to have growth partners and we chose four.
00:25:49
I think maybe five in the US.
00:25:51
Each one had a different kind of view of the world.
00:25:53
One was really deep into healthcare.
00:25:55
One is really deep into helping startups get going.
00:26:01
They've been fantastic about leaning in and helping us really
00:26:05
get going.
00:26:05
Another is kind of more established and they've got some
00:26:10
more under-term relationships in paper in a lot of different
00:26:13
places.
00:26:13
And then the final is we needed a distributor.
00:26:16
We need a distributor to help us and really help us drive not
00:26:20
only just distribution, where we didn't have paper or a partner
00:26:22
didn't have paper, but also eventually help us with our
00:26:26
state and local education, higher education accounts.
00:26:29
So those are the four we went after.
00:26:31
It took almost nine months to get everyone's paper signed.
00:26:36
And then we started doing the same thing in Europe.
00:26:37
So we looked at Europe and said we've identified a distributor
00:26:42
in Ireland, one in Switzerland and one in Riyadh.
00:26:45
Those three distributors are our main key focus and we are
00:26:51
going to work with them as needed.
00:26:54
So we didn't scale ourselves out, inspire ourselves so thin
00:26:57
that we had to make everyone happy.
00:26:59
We didn't make four or five happy in the us, three or four,
00:27:03
two in australia.
00:27:04
So we it's a little easier to balance on that tightrope when
00:27:08
you're not dealing with, you're dealing with a manageable amount
00:27:12
and it's worked.
00:27:17
I have to order some more Yetis because we need more family
00:27:19
member mugs out there, but it's worked to really personalize the
00:27:29
story and experience.
00:27:31
And, for example, we were at a partner sales kickoff earlier
00:27:33
this year in February and we not only just showed up as Asimily,
00:27:38
but we showed up Asimily with their wearing their logos as
00:27:42
well to really say we're part of your family too.
00:27:46
So they, for a moment, wait a second.
00:27:49
Who do you actually work for?
00:27:50
It was kind of fun, but it's the attention to detail that
00:27:55
matters.
00:27:55
I've said this time and time again and some people I worked
00:28:02
with in my previous life we talked about attention to detail
00:28:06
as one of those things that really matter because, at the
00:28:09
end of the day, the small things can make big results.
00:28:12
And you just got to make sure that your customers know that,
00:28:17
as you're building trust within the department community, that
00:28:20
every little thing matters.
00:28:21
And it's hard, right, because you don't want to let those
00:28:24
balls drop and if they do, you want to pick them up fast.
00:28:26
And that's happened to.
00:28:27
Um, you know, balls have dropped, but we we respond and
00:28:30
we pick them up fast.
00:28:31
Maciej: Thank you for that there's a lot.
00:28:33
There's quite a few things that you mentioned that keep coming
00:28:35
up in conversations that I'm having in my professional sales
00:28:40
career.
00:28:40
Some of those you know I'd be speaking to companies who are
00:28:45
thinking about the new go-to-market strategy.
00:28:47
They understand that channel is very beneficial to the sales
00:28:51
motion, but they want to go and you know they want to sign paper
00:28:55
with as many partners as possible and as many geographies
00:28:58
as possible.
00:28:59
Right, but that is so difficult, um, or sorry, it is so easy to
00:29:05
do but you can't execute it because you don't have that
00:29:08
bandwidth that you were talking about, right?
00:29:09
I mean, how are you going to train your partners if you have
00:29:12
a hundred of them, you know overnight?
00:29:13
Mean, how are you going to train your partners if you have
00:29:14
a hundred of them, you know overnight, and how are you going
00:29:16
to service them?
00:29:17
I mean, those partners have needs on an ongoing basis.
00:29:20
So you need, you know, some human interaction and I've never
00:29:26
met with anyone from an organization that does go to the
00:29:30
market through the channel that have an overstaffed channel
00:29:33
team.
00:29:33
That just doesn't happen.
00:29:36
Peter Hancock: That doesn't happen, no, no.
00:29:39
Maciej: Right.
00:29:39
So yeah, as you were talking about this, I was just nodding
00:29:44
here because I've heard it so many times where some companies
00:29:48
or you know, some leaders not necessarily companies, but some
00:29:51
leaders have come in, made some very quick decisions that just
00:29:55
blew up in their face and they had to retract and rebuild.
00:29:59
Right, it's that crawl, walk run approach really works,
00:30:03
especially within channel.
00:30:05
It's all about relationships.
00:30:06
It takes time to develop them and on top of that, it's
00:30:10
training the technology.
00:30:11
Peter Hancock: You're selling trust, right, you're selling
00:30:13
trust.
00:30:13
You're selling trust, you're selling confidence.
00:30:15
We actually had this conversation two weeks ago I
00:30:17
think it was um one of our customers, in order to buy uh,
00:30:23
really one.
00:30:24
They're.
00:30:24
They're not customers, they're clients right, they're making a
00:30:27
significant investment in what you do and and making sure that
00:30:31
you are the right provider to safeguard their patients, their
00:30:34
citizens, their consumers.
00:30:36
The other part of it is we really kind of walk through
00:30:40
their journey.
00:30:42
We did our typical bid deal review, like we've all done in
00:30:45
our past, and at the end of it the answer we had was they're
00:30:49
buying confidence.
00:30:50
They're buying confidence that they're going to displace their
00:30:53
incumbent A and they're going to go with us, that we've done
00:30:57
this 100 times before.
00:30:58
We know what we're doing.
00:31:00
We know what the outcome is.
00:31:01
We have the relationships with our alliance partners that are
00:31:06
the big OEM.
00:31:07
So a lot of what Asimily does is integrate with vulnerability
00:31:11
management and network and endpoint, because the more we
00:31:14
can help you see everything on your network, the more we can
00:31:17
protect your network.
00:31:17
So the relationships that we've built over the last seven plus
00:31:21
years with those kind of mega OEMs matters, and those are the
00:31:27
phone calls we roll and make during the course of those
00:31:29
evaluation cycles that really show the difference to our
00:31:30
customers, during the course of those evaluation cycles that
00:31:32
really showed a difference to our customers.
00:31:34
Maciej: And, as you're looking ahead you've been at Asimily for
00:31:37
18 months how do you envision the future direction of
00:31:42
Asimily's channel program?
00:31:43
Are you already thinking of potentially some strategic
00:31:47
changes to this?
00:31:48
Are you going and look for more distributors, more value-added
00:31:54
resellers, anything that you can share with us what the future
00:31:58
might hold for a Simulist channel program?
00:32:01
Peter Hancock: I actually had this conversation with one of my
00:32:03
people last night.
00:32:04
We're good on who we've signed up so far.
00:32:07
Now it's a little bit of who's going to rise to the top and
00:32:14
who's going to really be the the , the partner of the year when
00:32:17
we're at our sales kickoff next year.
00:32:19
So I I've been very conscious to say you know there's a
00:32:23
partner of the year, you know program next year because we're
00:32:26
in year two, right?
00:32:27
So we want to.
00:32:28
We didn't want to rush and be premature and say, uh, mr, we
00:32:31
didn't want to rush and be premature and say Mr and Mrs
00:32:33
Partner, you did three deals with us and you're the partner
00:32:35
of the year.
00:32:36
No, we want to say there's sustained momentum here, there's
00:32:40
sustained revenue.
00:32:41
You were a household name within your organization of
00:32:45
2 people.
00:32:46
That's really kind of a bold goal, a big, very audacious goal
00:32:50
for us.
00:32:50
Second is, who is that part of the year at Sales Kickoff who's
00:32:55
going to be on stage with us as we're doing a success story of
00:33:01
how to solve for the channel, with the customer on stage?
00:33:03
That would be another great thing.
00:33:05
Everyone does it.
00:33:07
But when you're moving from where we've been over the last
00:33:11
seven plus years to where we're going.
00:33:14
It's the things that we all take for granted when we're
00:33:17
larger organizations that we're bringing forward into the
00:33:21
culture of this company.
00:33:22
And the other piece of that is really celebrating all the wins,
00:33:25
celebrating where we get wins, so not just when you get a PO,
00:33:29
when you close a deal, but all the little things that matter.
00:33:32
Of course there's a lot of operational pieces that we're
00:33:35
getting really tight on and we celebrate those almost every day
00:33:38
.
00:33:38
Now it's been really fun to see everyone kind of rowing in that
00:33:42
same direction.
00:33:43
There's a you're from the UK, so 2000.
00:33:48
You probably remember the great British rowing team winning the
00:33:52
gold medal in Sydney, australia , and they're the leader of that
00:33:58
team and now has a podcast and a leadership series and all
00:34:03
sorts of things over the course of time.
00:34:04
For those that are not aware.
00:34:05
And the name of the company is what makes the boat go faster,
00:34:09
because that was their mantra back in the late 90s, going into
00:34:13
2000.
00:34:14
They lost either.
00:34:15
I think they turned seventh in 96 and in 92.
00:34:20
And they were just how do we go win the gold medal?
00:34:23
How do we get to the gold medal ?
00:34:24
How do we get to Sydney and get the gold medal?
00:34:26
And it went from everything to realizing that people were going
00:34:30
sneaking in more gym workouts.
00:34:32
They were not sleeping at night , they were eating ice cream.
00:34:36
They didn't have the right sheets on the oars, so they had
00:34:40
headwinds.
00:34:41
And when they paid attention to every little detail, the team
00:34:45
worked together.
00:34:46
That mantra of what makes the boat go faster got them the gold
00:34:50
medal and we've adopted that ourselves.
00:34:52
Is what makes the boat go faster.
00:34:53
Faster because we're at a great size and we're going fast and
00:34:58
we want to make sure that this is a true team effort.
00:35:00
So probably not an advantage to your future of the chair
00:35:05
program.
00:35:06
But that's really the kind of the mindset shift and anything
00:35:10
else that we're really continuing to support.
00:35:12
Maciej: So what I'm hearing is there's no big changes coming up
00:35:15
in terms of how the program is structured.
00:35:18
It's really solidifying on all the good things and refining
00:35:22
those small things that are going to make you go faster.
00:35:24
Peter Hancock: Yeah, we've got a great foundation.
00:35:26
We've got a great team, great support, yes, super.
00:35:33
Maciej: And one question that I always ask what's the one thing,
00:35:37
peter, that you wish you knew before you started your career
00:35:41
in channel?
00:35:42
Peter Hancock: before I started my career here, as similarly or
00:35:44
in channel in general in channel in general.
00:35:47
Maciej: What's the one thing you wish you knew?
00:35:51
Peter Hancock: I think for, similarly, that I should have
00:35:54
accepted not to sleep, uh, but I think the channel in general um
00:36:00
, I'm gonna phrase it a different way, if you don't mind
00:36:02
.
00:36:02
Sure, the one thing that I pass along to people who are now
00:36:07
that I'm kind of just pay it forward mode is relationships
00:36:10
matter and the people that I've talked to.
00:36:14
Some of the names that I mentioned today, I worked with
00:36:17
15 years ago, our head of revenue operations.
00:36:20
I've known her 12, 15 plus years, the woman that is running
00:36:26
sales and management for us.
00:36:27
I knew her like three careers ago.
00:36:29
These are the relationships where, now that we're in the
00:36:34
positions that we are, we can bring it all together and bring
00:36:37
the dream team together.
00:36:38
But at the end of the day, I had a sales leader named John who
00:36:44
really taught me that relationships are so key to
00:36:48
everything we do.
00:36:48
And it sounds very simple because in life we all have
00:36:51
relationships.
00:36:52
But it's those relationships that matter, that tie us through
00:36:55
, and there's ones where I think , for anyone listening who's
00:36:59
younger in their career, you may have an inaction with someone
00:37:03
five years ago that you think you'll never see again and then,
00:37:06
15 years later, they call you up and say I need someone that
00:37:10
does what you do, and you may be surprised by that phone call,
00:37:14
but it's because you had an impact on that person 15 years
00:37:17
ago.
00:37:18
Maciej: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Peter.
00:37:20
Thank you so so much for joining me on the podcast.
00:37:23
I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, Wishing you all
00:37:27
the best and to a simile in the future, Looking forward to
00:37:32
seeing the news who the partner of the year is going to be at
00:37:35
your kickoff.
00:37:37
Peter Hancock: I have some bets out there, yeah.
00:37:39
Maciej: I bet you people are betting internally of who that's
00:37:43
going to be and a lot of the sales reps are probably doing
00:37:46
everything that it is the partner that they look after,
00:37:49
right?
00:37:50
Peter Hancock: Yes, exactly this has been a pleasure.
00:37:52
I love sharing the story and sharing our journey and
00:37:56
hopefully this is good content for you and I appreciate the
00:38:03
time.
00:38:04
Maciej: Thank you so much, peter .
00:38:05
Thank you, and that's a wrap for this episode.
00:38:11
I do hope you found it valuable and, if you did, please make
00:38:15
sure to subscribe and leave a review.
00:38:16
You can also follow Channel Voices podcast on LinkedIn,
00:38:20
twitter and Facebook, or just visit channelvoicescom, where
00:38:24
you can send me a message or leave a voicemail.
00:38:27
All of the links are listed in the show notes and, once again,
00:38:31
I appreciate you tuning in today Until next time, thank you.
Peter Hancock: So we're really leveraging not just the company
00:00:03
brand but the channel and which partner can help open up the
00:00:06
doors for us.
00:00:07
So I don't think it's normal I absolutely don't think it's
00:00:11
normal to do what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months
00:00:14
and flip the company from a direct selling motion to
00:00:18
indirect and have so much channel focus.
00:00:21
I think it's actually should be , should have taken three years
00:00:24
to get where we are today, but we've got great support from the
00:00:27
executive team, from our CEO.
00:00:29
The partners like what they hear.
00:00:31
They see that they can make money with us and we do.
00:00:33
We have worked really hard on building our story and our
00:00:36
differentiation and that's what matters, Because at the end of
00:00:39
the day, the customer says I know I have this problem, Now do
00:00:42
I?
00:00:42
I want to go ahead and address it, and that's where the partner
00:00:45
comes in.
00:00:51
Maciej: Hello, welcome and thank you for tuning in to Channel
00:00:54
Voices, the podcast for future channel leaders, where we learn
00:00:59
the ins and outs of partner ecosystems through casual
00:01:02
conversations with channel professionals from a variety of
00:01:05
industries, partner types and geographies.
00:01:08
My name is Maciek and I'm your host, peter Hancock.
00:01:16
Welcome to Channel Voices, thank you very much.
00:01:19
Peter Hancock: I appreciate being here today.
00:01:22
Maciej: Thank you so much for joining me for this episode.
00:01:25
As we kick things off, would you mind just telling us a
00:01:28
little bit about your channel background and your current role
00:01:32
at Asimily?
00:01:33
Peter Hancock: Yeah, so my channel.
00:01:34
So again, peter Hancock, I've been with Asimily for about a
00:01:37
year and a half.
00:01:38
My channel background is really someone who has lived either at
00:01:42
the OEMs or with channel partners over the years and
00:01:47
really look at the channel as the multiplier effect, whether I
00:01:51
was with Symantec back in the day and we worked with our
00:01:54
channel partners on the consulting and service side, or
00:01:57
my most recent spend of time prior to coming to Asimily,
00:02:02
whereas with a large services and solution provider in the US.
00:02:06
What I really looked at is how does the channel represent and
00:02:12
really become the advocate of the vendors, of the OEMs, but
00:02:17
really listen to the voice of the customer and what problems
00:02:21
are the customer trying to solve ?
00:02:23
And when you build out a channel program that is really
00:02:28
focused on making the partner successful with their customers,
00:02:31
then you're in a really good place.
00:02:34
And the short version of the story, which I'm sure we'll dive
00:02:37
into more here, is that when I got the opportunity to come to
00:02:41
Asimily last year, 18 months ago or so, we were building a
00:02:45
channel partner program from scratch.
00:02:47
We had sold the entirety of the company 100% direct.
00:02:53
So within the last 18 months we've moved from 100% direct to
00:02:57
100% indirect.
00:02:58
Over the last 14 months or so, I was leading the partner
00:03:02
program in our channel across the globe.
00:03:03
We have approximately our channel across the globe.
00:03:04
We have approximately 20 partners across the US, saudi
00:03:08
Arabia, germany, europe and Australia, and now I'm the CRO
00:03:14
and in charge of all global sales and our go-to-market
00:03:17
strategies.
00:03:18
Maciej: Great introduction, thank you for that.
00:03:20
So you mentioned when you came over to, to Asimily, that was
00:03:24
all kind of direct sales and you had to bring in the, the
00:03:29
channel into into play and extend that sales um, that sales
00:03:35
team, I suppose and reach more, reach more prospects, reach
00:03:39
more customers, right?
00:03:40
So how was the journey of launching Asimily's first
00:03:46
channel program?
00:03:47
Peter Hancock: It was only possible because we had
00:03:49
executive support.
00:03:49
Our CEO and our CRO at the time 100% were on board for the
00:03:55
channel we had been really building out, Asimily to be
00:03:59
focused on customer experience and solving complex needs that
00:04:03
not everyone understands today the world, the landscape, the
00:04:06
Internet, I think, and what kind of security holes it introduces
00:04:13
to the world.
00:04:13
So one you have to be aware of a problem, you have to educate
00:04:15
your customers, you have to educate the partners that this
00:04:21
is actually something that is going to cause could cause more
00:04:22
potential security compromises in the world to citizens,
00:04:25
patients, humans and kind of just overall the experiences
00:04:29
that people have whether they're at home at their own hospital,
00:04:33
whether they're in the city or a transportation center.
00:04:35
So the education part was a big piece to say what is the
00:04:40
problem that we're solving today .
00:04:41
The next piece of it is I had to kind of go into it with eyes
00:04:46
wide open and I had been at a partner for the previous four
00:04:50
years and I also knew through my days at Symantec or ForgeRock
00:04:55
or my previous company where I had been able to see my network
00:05:01
spread out.
00:05:02
So, as we all do over the course of our lifetime, you work
00:05:05
with the people that you like and you work with the people you
00:05:07
trust.
00:05:09
When I was coming over here, I came over to a company that was
00:05:13
very focused on selling direct through their network but
00:05:17
realized that's only going to go so far.
00:05:19
You can only grow so far, so fast.
00:05:23
Great customer install base, incredible technology, really an
00:05:27
engineering-led company for the first seven years or so.
00:05:30
And now it was how do we shift this go-to-market so we can have
00:05:33
rapid explosion?
00:05:34
Because our competitors are growing at tens of 20s of
00:05:39
hundreds of factors every year and we are primed for that as
00:05:44
well.
00:05:44
So let's get us in a place to say we're going to go 10X, 20x,
00:05:47
100x, and that's where we got started.
00:05:50
So we went from.
00:05:52
What is the concept of deal registration, margin programs?
00:05:56
Are we going to be comp neutral ?
00:05:57
Are we going to be a prop?
00:06:00
Are we going to be a margin-based program?
00:06:01
Are we going to be a margin-based program?
00:06:02
We're going to be a discount-based program?
00:06:04
How does that differ in the us versus germany, versus saudi
00:06:08
arabia?
00:06:08
Where do we have reseller agreements in place?
00:06:11
All of it.
00:06:12
If you can imagine anyone listening to this podcast, if
00:06:15
you've walked into a channel, it's completely built.
00:06:17
You'd kind of take it for granted.
00:06:18
But as you get to be at the forefront of it, it's really
00:06:22
kind of fun and exciting.
00:06:23
It's a lot of work.
00:06:24
You're going through a lot of contract, a lot of process, and
00:06:30
you're taking an existing sales team and recruiting an existing
00:06:31
sales team to say you're going to get a whole lot more help now
00:06:35
because we are going to go to our channel partners, our
00:06:39
resellers and, for us, eventually, managed service
00:06:42
providers, help be that multiplier effect, be that
00:06:45
trumpet that just kind of gets the noise out there and gets the
00:06:49
message out.
00:06:50
There is probably a better way of saying that.
00:06:51
And it was fun.
00:06:53
It was a lot of fun.
00:06:54
I was able to bring on someone for North America.
00:06:58
She and I had worked together in a previous life and my
00:07:03
promise to her was you get to build something from scratch.
00:07:06
You've been in the channel for, let's call it, 20 years.
00:07:10
You've always inherited the program.
00:07:12
What if you could build the program from scratch?
00:07:14
And that was intriguing enough to say let's come on over.
00:07:23
Same conversation with a gentleman that runs EMEA for us.
00:07:25
He's based in the uk and he's built out channel programs in
00:07:26
the past.
00:07:26
He's always kind of had oversight as to what they wanted
00:07:30
and how they wanted it.
00:07:31
For us it was here's your landscape who are the partners
00:07:35
that you want to go after, who are they distribute the
00:07:38
value-added distributors, value-added resellers and who
00:07:42
are the?
00:07:42
Who are those partners that are actually going to make an
00:07:44
impact for us?
00:07:44
And he was also able to do that .
00:07:46
So today we have and I had a big boss of Yetis over here just
00:07:53
a few minutes ago.
00:07:54
We have what we call our founding members program and our
00:07:58
founding members program is the first sales team, so account
00:08:02
exec and sales engineer and potentially channel manager, if
00:08:06
that person is part of that sales cycle that we consider our
00:08:10
founding members Because we know that, as you're bringing in
00:08:14
not a startup technology, we're not a startup technology.
00:08:17
We've been around a long time.
00:08:18
But it is a newer technology.
00:08:20
It's a newer part of the threat landscape that not all CISOs
00:08:23
are aware of.
00:08:23
You are now a founding member of our success and we appreciate
00:08:28
you for that, and that's kind of one of the unique things that
00:08:31
we're doing differently is to really appreciate what our
00:08:34
partners are doing for us as a company and at the same time
00:08:39
thinking about where else can we leverage their expertise, their
00:08:43
skills.
00:08:43
There's been more than a few partners who said your quoting
00:08:47
system doesn't quite work for us .
00:08:49
It seems like it's built for more of a direct will help you.
00:08:52
And we've got on a session.
00:08:54
We've looked, they shared with how they would build a quote out
00:08:57
.
00:08:57
We pivoted and we fill a quote.
00:08:59
So for we use this example a lot.
00:09:02
I know it's more of a US-centric example, but in the
00:09:05
movie the Nike Air movie they talk about Michael Jordan and,
00:09:10
for those that are familiar, they talk about building a shoe
00:09:12
around the player.
00:09:13
They talk about a shoe is just a shoe until my stun steps into
00:09:18
it.
00:09:18
It's the Mrs Jordan quote at the very end.
00:09:20
So we were kind of going through our program and we
00:09:24
wanted to have a unique name.
00:09:26
We wanted to really think about something that CRM has not had
00:09:30
anyone else registered and that's where we came up with the
00:09:32
program launch.
00:09:33
So we use a lot of rocket ship and a lot of semi-sonic,
00:09:36
supersonic in our language.
00:09:38
But we also use the fact that we've built the program around
00:09:41
the partner and even last week we were going through something
00:09:46
and the partner said this is a little awkward in the flow,
00:09:51
here's how we do it.
00:09:51
We were able to take that, incorporate that back in and now
00:09:56
we've got a much more efficient sales process as far as the
00:10:00
close.
00:10:00
And so now that we've got invoices and POs and we
00:10:04
understand how they invoice their customer, we can actually
00:10:08
pivot just a little bit and say we can be much more efficient
00:10:11
and be a better partner to you.
00:10:14
And I think for anyone that's been in sales for any amount of
00:10:17
time, they know you got to make the sales cycle easy.
00:10:20
You got to make it efficient, don't make it hard.
00:10:23
Sales reps don't want to make it hard.
00:10:24
Sales reps don't want to live in salesforce, they don't want
00:10:26
to live in hubspot.
00:10:27
They want to be out with the customers.
00:10:29
They want to be able to sell, and the more that we can do this
00:10:32
head the program.
00:10:32
Support them, be successful and go make money.
00:10:35
That's what we're doing.
00:10:36
Maciej: I'm I'm glad to hear that, hey, you listen to your
00:10:40
partners and you listen really intentionally and you
00:10:45
incorporate that feedback and can make adjustments as they
00:10:49
make sense.
00:10:50
Obviously, what were some of those, I suppose, decisions that
00:10:53
you made when you were designing that channel program,
00:10:56
because obviously channel programs evolve right, but when
00:10:59
you start, what were some of those most critical decisions
00:11:03
that you had to make?
00:11:04
Peter Hancock: The first one I walked into, which was folks
00:11:07
were going from 100% direct to 100% indirect and what that
00:11:13
meant is education of a few of the account executives who had
00:11:18
been here in the past.
00:11:19
It also meant the departure of one because they could not
00:11:24
comprehend.
00:11:24
They could not comprehend how to work with a partner and
00:11:27
actually riled against the system and probably caused us
00:11:30
more grief than anything else.
00:11:32
Eventually it could cause us brand damage if we kind of let
00:11:34
that reside.
00:11:35
The next piece of it was really how do you work with a channel
00:11:40
partner?
00:11:40
How do you bring in a partner who is really?
00:11:44
They either can get a meeting with a CISO, they have paper or
00:11:51
they have either done one transaction or millions of
00:11:55
dollars of transactions with this customer over the years.
00:11:57
So they trust and the partner usually a partner account
00:12:01
executive owns that trust and by opening us into that world,
00:12:07
into their world, they're extending that trust.
00:12:10
They're extending that trust and everything we do when we
00:12:16
engage with a partner and they're selling and we're now on
00:12:18
board with customers, is to make sure that their brand is
00:12:20
extended into what we do.
00:12:22
So every deal that we've done with the partner over the last
00:12:25
year and we've done the onboarding.
00:12:26
We make sure that the partner stays engaged, that they're
00:12:29
aware of, aware of what the next steps.
00:12:31
We had a deal two or three weeks ago where, in just
00:12:36
speaking with a customer, he said I like everything I've seen
00:12:39
.
00:12:39
I want more.
00:12:40
And that partner was able to expedite the sales process
00:12:43
within two weeks in order to help us close within the month,
00:12:48
which is fantastic because it gives us more revenue for that
00:12:51
month.
00:12:51
So that's the education of the sales team as to what does this
00:12:56
all mean to them, because they just weren't in that cycle
00:12:59
before and that's a little bit of the startup mode that we were
00:13:02
in 18 months ago.
00:13:04
Where we are today came out of the gate strong with a
00:13:07
competitive margin program.
00:13:09
We made the decision to be comp neutral.
00:13:12
Competitive margin program we made the decision to be comp
00:13:15
neutral.
00:13:15
So for any of our reps out there today, the margin doesn't
00:13:18
hurt them, and that was a big decision.
00:13:21
That was a financial decision that we had to make, but also
00:13:24
very well received by our partners.
00:13:25
And then we went through a competitive takeout program.
00:13:29
So we are offering a much greater margin to our partners.
00:13:36
If they can actually help facilitate and help drive
00:13:37
competitive takeout.
00:13:38
That's where you can always go after as well.
00:13:43
Then it came to kind of having a public face.
00:13:46
So what is the name of this program, what's the brand,
00:13:49
what's the website, what's deal, registration, all the other
00:13:51
mechanics that you would normally see.
00:13:52
Hiring Wayne and Diana that was two more people.
00:13:56
We actually have a third person starting on Monday, so we'd
00:13:59
have a second person starting on the West Coast.
00:14:02
So Priya starts on Monday.
00:14:03
And then we've engaged with a few partners in Australia who
00:14:08
are really going to be our real first feet on the ground and
00:14:12
we've got a few factors, I feel like, over in Australia.
00:14:14
So those are kind of all the different moving parts that you
00:14:18
could imagine.
00:14:18
Maciej: I've been in situations.
00:14:19
I've been in companies where a rep was told that you know, from
00:14:25
now on you're going to be working with partners.
00:14:27
For some it was a no-brainer Either they were just very
00:14:31
clever and understood the concept and how it can help them
00:14:35
drive their own sales.
00:14:36
Or there was that moment where, no, I don't understand this,
00:14:41
and why is there margins and why is my deal not worth as much as
00:14:44
it used to be?
00:14:45
And I'm out basically.
00:14:47
So yeah, I've been in those situations and try to you know
00:14:51
as much as I could at that time educate my reps in the team on
00:14:56
how that really works.
00:14:57
But it really everything starts with that relationship building
00:15:04
, right?
00:15:05
So with that in mind and you know how you structured your
00:15:08
program, which seems it's very collaborative with the partners,
00:15:12
right, Like, was it very hard to get off the ground?
00:15:17
Is that something that you consciously have decided to
00:15:19
collaborate with the partners to create that program, or is that
00:15:24
something that just came out in the wash?
00:15:25
That's a great question I.
00:15:27
Peter Hancock: I think there's a couple times we ran into the
00:15:29
wall and broke our nose and realized, hey, we're doing this
00:15:34
the hard way, so let's kind of think about this.
00:15:37
We've all been doing this for a few years.
00:15:42
Let's just call it that Be kind to our age.
00:15:44
Right now we have colleagues, allies, people we've worked with
00:15:48
, people we've been in the trenches with, who are spread
00:15:51
out throughout the world that we live in and they're more than
00:15:55
happy to help us out, because we'll help them out.
00:15:57
I think reciprocity and those relationships matter at the end
00:16:01
of the day.
00:16:02
I will tell you that as we were building out our quoting system
00:16:05
last July, we realized that it was a really direct base.
00:16:10
It had not incorporated margin.
00:16:12
It wasn't very intuitive.
00:16:13
We were seeing mistakes come back when partners were quoting
00:16:17
to customers.
00:16:17
We took a pause and said, okay, who do we know operationally as
00:16:21
some of our partners let's call them up, I'm just giving
00:16:25
feedback and said here's our quote how would you enter this
00:16:27
into the system?
00:16:28
We entered it in and we saw how they did it.
00:16:30
There's a few mistakes here.
00:16:33
There's room for improvement here.
00:16:35
So that piece of it was a just realizing that we weren't
00:16:41
exactly where we needed to be.
00:16:42
So we took the feedback and we've made it better and it's
00:16:48
been a better experience, better selling process with that
00:16:50
partner, and all the others have benefited as well.
00:16:51
That's been a better experience , better selling process with
00:16:53
that partner, and all the others have benefited as well, so
00:16:54
that's been a fantastic piece.
00:16:57
I think the other two elements that I would say that were one
00:17:02
react and two proactive.
00:17:04
I'll talk about proactive for a second.
00:17:05
It's really mapping the customer journey.
00:17:08
We are like you said, we're in a newer space.
00:17:12
We are like we said, we're in a newer space and the customer
00:17:14
journey is one where the security leader has to be aware
00:17:19
that this actually could be a problem for him or her and they
00:17:23
need a little bit of education.
00:17:24
And the buying cycles vary from industry to industry.
00:17:28
Whether you're in healthcare, you're a city.
00:17:31
You do a lot with smart cities, smart buildings.
00:17:35
So all those cameras and badge readers and TVs and traffic
00:17:40
signals and water control systems that are in the cities
00:17:44
today or even on college campuses, those are different
00:17:48
kind of buyers and we've learned that each partner has kind of
00:17:53
has different kinds of relationships to those different
00:17:55
buyers and, for example, yesterday we hosted a webcast
00:18:01
podcast to to the U S for smart city, smart building and for
00:18:08
transportation through our partner, and our partner has the
00:18:13
contract and all the elements in place that we need to do the
00:18:16
transaction, but they also have that customer list.
00:18:19
Yeah, we also did the same thing with it.
00:18:22
We're doing the same thing with a partner in switzerland too,
00:18:25
where they've got.
00:18:26
They've got relationships where they can bring us in the door.
00:18:28
They just need a little bit of education.
00:18:30
So, as we're looking at how do we truly scale the larger firms
00:18:35
some of the distribution firms have their own inside sales
00:18:38
teams that we are now really working to educate and leverage
00:18:43
to help drive conversations and deals and we're finding now, a
00:18:47
year and a half into our channel program, that the most
00:18:51
effective thing that we're doing are these webinars, are these
00:18:54
kind of call campaigns where a year ago we wouldn't have been
00:19:00
able to pull that off.
00:19:01
We just had too much on our plate.
00:19:03
But now the problem is understood much better by the
00:19:06
industry and we're now putting a lot more thought leadership
00:19:12
content out there.
00:19:13
So our marketing team has done a fantastic job of really
00:19:16
driving thought leadership and getting us in front of the right
00:19:20
conferences and getting on.
00:19:21
That is kind of driven by feedback from the partners.
00:19:39
Maciej: Have you ever been working in such an environment,
00:19:43
in such a situation?
00:19:44
If yes, could you elaborate a little bit?
00:19:49
And if not, how does that compare to the other channel
00:19:54
programs that you've been working within?
00:19:56
Peter Hancock: I'd say I've got kind of two parts to that
00:19:59
question.
00:20:00
The first was my previous life, before Asimily.
00:20:05
I was in a position to work with a lot of startups and
00:20:10
companies that weren't the mega, not the CrowdStrike, not the
00:20:15
follow-up.
00:20:15
I mean, we worked with them too and they were number one,
00:20:18
number two, number three of our partners right, hundreds of
00:20:20
dollars.
00:20:20
But we also had all these other companies where you knew that
00:20:24
they had value.
00:20:25
They were differentiated but they really needed help with
00:20:28
their messaging or they really needed help kind of doing a
00:20:30
proof of concept or their sales cycles messaging, or they really
00:20:33
needed help kind of doing a proof of concept or their sales
00:20:36
cycles.
00:20:36
And every once in a while you get a.
00:20:37
You get a phone call from a pre , from a colleague saying, hey,
00:20:39
I joined this new company.
00:20:40
It's really cool, get me on your line card.
00:20:43
Okay, that's really cool, but are you the same as the 40 other
00:20:47
vendors in your space either?
00:20:49
What are you doing different?
00:20:50
And there was one or two um, and I think of one.
00:20:55
It was a really cool kind of like honeypot technology and the
00:21:00
this.
00:21:01
The head of sales and I were friends from a previous life and
00:21:05
we got to meet at rsa a few different times and kind of just
00:21:08
walk through what is the buyer journey, what is the customer's
00:21:12
experience?
00:21:13
How do they make money?
00:21:14
He was really kind of open with us and then we started to be
00:21:18
able to go on to join customers together and that's where all
00:21:22
the magic happens.
00:21:23
I think anyone who's ever sold through the channel knows that
00:21:26
at the end of the day, it's seller to seller, it's seller to
00:21:30
seller.
00:21:31
We get along, we like each other, we're going to do some
00:21:34
good things together and the customer trusts me as the
00:21:37
partner.
00:21:37
So if I bring you in, you better not screw up, and that's
00:21:43
what I witnessed.
00:21:44
That's the takeaway.
00:21:45
One of the biggest takeaways I had from my last four years is
00:21:49
that the really most successful companies that we were able to
00:21:52
onboard were the ones that wanted to work with us, could
00:21:56
absolutely tell the differentiation, tell their
00:21:58
story, and that's what we're doing here is we are now.
00:22:01
I'm now.
00:22:02
I'm in those shoes and I'm going to my former colleagues,
00:22:05
my friends, and saying, hey, we've got something really cool
00:22:08
and differentiated here, and for some I it took me a year to go
00:22:13
address, because I know once I open, knock on that door, that
00:22:16
person is going to open us up to 20, 30 accounts and we were
00:22:21
probably just kind of getting our feet underneath as far as
00:22:24
getting wins in the channel.
00:22:27
Our WinWire program is really starting to take off.
00:22:30
Our channel program is really starting to get some recognition
00:22:35
.
00:22:35
We've been on planes pretty much 50 weeks out of last year
00:22:39
getting around to different sales kickoffs and different
00:22:42
conferences.
00:22:43
We actually just finished one in Germany this week.
00:22:46
We've got Saudi Arabia in two or three weeks, the Gulf
00:22:50
Information Security Conference.
00:22:51
One of the large 40 people I think will be there.
00:22:54
So we're really kind of leveraging not just the company
00:22:57
brand but the channel and which partner can help open up the
00:23:01
doors for us.
00:23:01
So I don't think it's normal I absolutely don't think it's
00:23:05
normal to do what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months
00:23:09
and flip the company from a direct selling motion to
00:23:12
indirect and have so much channel focus.
00:23:15
I think it actually should have taken three years to get where
00:23:19
we are today.
00:23:19
But we've got great support from the executive team, from
00:23:23
our CEO.
00:23:24
The partners like what they hear .
00:23:25
They see that they can make money with us and we have worked
00:23:28
really hard on building our story and our differentiation
00:23:32
and that's what matters.
00:23:32
Matters because at the end of the day, the customer says I
00:23:35
know I have this problem, now do I want to go go ahead and
00:23:38
address it?
00:23:38
And that's where the partner comes in.
00:23:39
Um, for example, we were on a call it was yesterday um
00:23:44
customer, I was kind of comparing apple, you know us, us
00:23:48
to our competitor, apples to you know, oranges, maybe, maybe
00:23:52
green apples to red apples, and it came down to okay, you're
00:23:57
trying to compare everything Asimily does to their competitor
00:24:01
, what's really important to you .
00:24:04
And that's a conversation we, being new to the CISO, could
00:24:08
have had.
00:24:08
The partner's been working with them for five years, so they
00:24:11
were able to call in and say okay, let's go have lunch, let's
00:24:15
go, let's go have a coffee, let's talk about what's really
00:24:18
important to you.
00:24:19
That partner was able to come back to us and say here's the
00:24:23
three things you need to go figure out and go message to
00:24:27
this prospect, okay, and you'll be closer to winning this deal.
00:24:30
And when we see that time and time again, then you get
00:24:34
believers in your sales reps and then, at the end of the day,
00:24:40
they really start to drive the story and they start to drive
00:24:43
the success.
00:24:44
Maciej: Excellent.
00:24:44
So you listen to your partner's feedback.
00:24:47
That quoting example that you have given is really good.
00:24:52
But obviously every partner is going to have different needs.
00:24:56
They will give you feedback that might contradict with
00:25:00
another partner's feedback.
00:25:02
So how do you balance the need for that consistency and
00:25:08
standardization within your channel program but still kind
00:25:12
of maintaining that flexibility that's required to accommodate
00:25:17
partners' needs?
00:25:19
Peter Hancock: We did something very specific last year.
00:25:21
One, because it's a bandwidth right.
00:25:23
When I first got on board it was just me, and then we fired
00:25:26
Diana, then we hired Wayne and now Priya starts Monday.
00:25:28
So we're building out the team.
00:25:31
We also didn't go out and get 300 partners.
00:25:34
We didn't go out there and say we're going to build, launch and
00:25:38
we're going to have semi-sonic and supersonic or gold, platinum
00:25:41
, silver I'm not a big fan of the metals status.
00:25:45
We're going to have growth partners and we chose four.
00:25:49
I think maybe five in the US.
00:25:51
Each one had a different kind of view of the world.
00:25:53
One was really deep into healthcare.
00:25:55
One is really deep into helping startups get going.
00:26:01
They've been fantastic about leaning in and helping us really
00:26:05
get going.
00:26:05
Another is kind of more established and they've got some
00:26:10
more under-term relationships in paper in a lot of different
00:26:13
places.
00:26:13
And then the final is we needed a distributor.
00:26:16
We need a distributor to help us and really help us drive not
00:26:20
only just distribution, where we didn't have paper or a partner
00:26:22
didn't have paper, but also eventually help us with our
00:26:26
state and local education, higher education accounts.
00:26:29
So those are the four we went after.
00:26:31
It took almost nine months to get everyone's paper signed.
00:26:36
And then we started doing the same thing in Europe.
00:26:37
So we looked at Europe and said we've identified a distributor
00:26:42
in Ireland, one in Switzerland and one in Riyadh.
00:26:45
Those three distributors are our main key focus and we are
00:26:51
going to work with them as needed.
00:26:54
So we didn't scale ourselves out, inspire ourselves so thin
00:26:57
that we had to make everyone happy.
00:26:59
We didn't make four or five happy in the us, three or four,
00:27:03
two in australia.
00:27:04
So we it's a little easier to balance on that tightrope when
00:27:08
you're not dealing with, you're dealing with a manageable amount
00:27:12
and it's worked.
00:27:17
I have to order some more Yetis because we need more family
00:27:19
member mugs out there, but it's worked to really personalize the
00:27:29
story and experience.
00:27:31
And, for example, we were at a partner sales kickoff earlier
00:27:33
this year in February and we not only just showed up as Asimily,
00:27:38
but we showed up Asimily with their wearing their logos as
00:27:42
well to really say we're part of your family too.
00:27:46
So they, for a moment, wait a second.
00:27:49
Who do you actually work for?
00:27:50
It was kind of fun, but it's the attention to detail that
00:27:55
matters.
00:27:55
I've said this time and time again and some people I worked
00:28:02
with in my previous life we talked about attention to detail
00:28:06
as one of those things that really matter because, at the
00:28:09
end of the day, the small things can make big results.
00:28:12
And you just got to make sure that your customers know that,
00:28:17
as you're building trust within the department community, that
00:28:20
every little thing matters.
00:28:21
And it's hard, right, because you don't want to let those
00:28:24
balls drop and if they do, you want to pick them up fast.
00:28:26
And that's happened to.
00:28:27
Um, you know, balls have dropped, but we we respond and
00:28:30
we pick them up fast.
00:28:31
Maciej: Thank you for that there's a lot.
00:28:33
There's quite a few things that you mentioned that keep coming
00:28:35
up in conversations that I'm having in my professional sales
00:28:40
career.
00:28:40
Some of those you know I'd be speaking to companies who are
00:28:45
thinking about the new go-to-market strategy.
00:28:47
They understand that channel is very beneficial to the sales
00:28:51
motion, but they want to go and you know they want to sign paper
00:28:55
with as many partners as possible and as many geographies
00:28:58
as possible.
00:28:59
Right, but that is so difficult, um, or sorry, it is so easy to
00:29:05
do but you can't execute it because you don't have that
00:29:08
bandwidth that you were talking about, right?
00:29:09
I mean, how are you going to train your partners if you have
00:29:12
a hundred of them, you know overnight?
00:29:13
Mean, how are you going to train your partners if you have
00:29:14
a hundred of them, you know overnight, and how are you going
00:29:16
to service them?
00:29:17
I mean, those partners have needs on an ongoing basis.
00:29:20
So you need, you know, some human interaction and I've never
00:29:26
met with anyone from an organization that does go to the
00:29:30
market through the channel that have an overstaffed channel
00:29:33
team.
00:29:33
That just doesn't happen.
00:29:36
Peter Hancock: That doesn't happen, no, no.
00:29:39
Maciej: Right.
00:29:39
So yeah, as you were talking about this, I was just nodding
00:29:44
here because I've heard it so many times where some companies
00:29:48
or you know, some leaders not necessarily companies, but some
00:29:51
leaders have come in, made some very quick decisions that just
00:29:55
blew up in their face and they had to retract and rebuild.
00:29:59
Right, it's that crawl, walk run approach really works,
00:30:03
especially within channel.
00:30:05
It's all about relationships.
00:30:06
It takes time to develop them and on top of that, it's
00:30:10
training the technology.
00:30:11
Peter Hancock: You're selling trust, right, you're selling
00:30:13
trust.
00:30:13
You're selling trust, you're selling confidence.
00:30:15
We actually had this conversation two weeks ago I
00:30:17
think it was um one of our customers, in order to buy uh,
00:30:23
really one.
00:30:24
They're.
00:30:24
They're not customers, they're clients right, they're making a
00:30:27
significant investment in what you do and and making sure that
00:30:31
you are the right provider to safeguard their patients, their
00:30:34
citizens, their consumers.
00:30:36
The other part of it is we really kind of walk through
00:30:40
their journey.
00:30:42
We did our typical bid deal review, like we've all done in
00:30:45
our past, and at the end of it the answer we had was they're
00:30:49
buying confidence.
00:30:50
They're buying confidence that they're going to displace their
00:30:53
incumbent A and they're going to go with us, that we've done
00:30:57
this 100 times before.
00:30:58
We know what we're doing.
00:31:00
We know what the outcome is.
00:31:01
We have the relationships with our alliance partners that are
00:31:06
the big OEM.
00:31:07
So a lot of what Asimily does is integrate with vulnerability
00:31:11
management and network and endpoint, because the more we
00:31:14
can help you see everything on your network, the more we can
00:31:17
protect your network.
00:31:17
So the relationships that we've built over the last seven plus
00:31:21
years with those kind of mega OEMs matters, and those are the
00:31:27
phone calls we roll and make during the course of those
00:31:29
evaluation cycles that really show the difference to our
00:31:30
customers, during the course of those evaluation cycles that
00:31:32
really showed a difference to our customers.
00:31:34
Maciej: And, as you're looking ahead you've been at Asimily for
00:31:37
18 months how do you envision the future direction of
00:31:42
Asimily's channel program?
00:31:43
Are you already thinking of potentially some strategic
00:31:47
changes to this?
00:31:48
Are you going and look for more distributors, more value-added
00:31:54
resellers, anything that you can share with us what the future
00:31:58
might hold for a Simulist channel program?
00:32:01
Peter Hancock: I actually had this conversation with one of my
00:32:03
people last night.
00:32:04
We're good on who we've signed up so far.
00:32:07
Now it's a little bit of who's going to rise to the top and
00:32:14
who's going to really be the the , the partner of the year when
00:32:17
we're at our sales kickoff next year.
00:32:19
So I I've been very conscious to say you know there's a
00:32:23
partner of the year, you know program next year because we're
00:32:26
in year two, right?
00:32:27
So we want to.
00:32:28
We didn't want to rush and be premature and say, uh, mr, we
00:32:31
didn't want to rush and be premature and say Mr and Mrs
00:32:33
Partner, you did three deals with us and you're the partner
00:32:35
of the year.
00:32:36
No, we want to say there's sustained momentum here, there's
00:32:40
sustained revenue.
00:32:41
You were a household name within your organization of
00:32:45
2 people.
00:32:46
That's really kind of a bold goal, a big, very audacious goal
00:32:50
for us.
00:32:50
Second is, who is that part of the year at Sales Kickoff who's
00:32:55
going to be on stage with us as we're doing a success story of
00:33:01
how to solve for the channel, with the customer on stage?
00:33:03
That would be another great thing.
00:33:05
Everyone does it.
00:33:07
But when you're moving from where we've been over the last
00:33:11
seven plus years to where we're going.
00:33:14
It's the things that we all take for granted when we're
00:33:17
larger organizations that we're bringing forward into the
00:33:21
culture of this company.
00:33:22
And the other piece of that is really celebrating all the wins,
00:33:25
celebrating where we get wins, so not just when you get a PO,
00:33:29
when you close a deal, but all the little things that matter.
00:33:32
Of course there's a lot of operational pieces that we're
00:33:35
getting really tight on and we celebrate those almost every day
00:33:38
.
00:33:38
Now it's been really fun to see everyone kind of rowing in that
00:33:42
same direction.
00:33:43
There's a you're from the UK, so 2000.
00:33:48
You probably remember the great British rowing team winning the
00:33:52
gold medal in Sydney, australia , and they're the leader of that
00:33:58
team and now has a podcast and a leadership series and all
00:34:03
sorts of things over the course of time.
00:34:04
For those that are not aware.
00:34:05
And the name of the company is what makes the boat go faster,
00:34:09
because that was their mantra back in the late 90s, going into
00:34:13
2000.
00:34:14
They lost either.
00:34:15
I think they turned seventh in 96 and in 92.
00:34:20
And they were just how do we go win the gold medal?
00:34:23
How do we get to the gold medal ?
00:34:24
How do we get to Sydney and get the gold medal?
00:34:26
And it went from everything to realizing that people were going
00:34:30
sneaking in more gym workouts.
00:34:32
They were not sleeping at night , they were eating ice cream.
00:34:36
They didn't have the right sheets on the oars, so they had
00:34:40
headwinds.
00:34:41
And when they paid attention to every little detail, the team
00:34:45
worked together.
00:34:46
That mantra of what makes the boat go faster got them the gold
00:34:50
medal and we've adopted that ourselves.
00:34:52
Is what makes the boat go faster.
00:34:53
Faster because we're at a great size and we're going fast and
00:34:58
we want to make sure that this is a true team effort.
00:35:00
So probably not an advantage to your future of the chair
00:35:05
program.
00:35:06
But that's really the kind of the mindset shift and anything
00:35:10
else that we're really continuing to support.
00:35:12
Maciej: So what I'm hearing is there's no big changes coming up
00:35:15
in terms of how the program is structured.
00:35:18
It's really solidifying on all the good things and refining
00:35:22
those small things that are going to make you go faster.
00:35:24
Peter Hancock: Yeah, we've got a great foundation.
00:35:26
We've got a great team, great support, yes, super.
00:35:33
Maciej: And one question that I always ask what's the one thing,
00:35:37
peter, that you wish you knew before you started your career
00:35:41
in channel?
00:35:42
Peter Hancock: before I started my career here, as similarly or
00:35:44
in channel in general in channel in general.
00:35:47
Maciej: What's the one thing you wish you knew?
00:35:51
Peter Hancock: I think for, similarly, that I should have
00:35:54
accepted not to sleep, uh, but I think the channel in general um
00:36:00
, I'm gonna phrase it a different way, if you don't mind
00:36:02
.
00:36:02
Sure, the one thing that I pass along to people who are now
00:36:07
that I'm kind of just pay it forward mode is relationships
00:36:10
matter and the people that I've talked to.
00:36:14
Some of the names that I mentioned today, I worked with
00:36:17
15 years ago, our head of revenue operations.
00:36:20
I've known her 12, 15 plus years, the woman that is running
00:36:26
sales and management for us.
00:36:27
I knew her like three careers ago.
00:36:29
These are the relationships where, now that we're in the
00:36:34
positions that we are, we can bring it all together and bring
00:36:37
the dream team together.
00:36:38
But at the end of the day, I had a sales leader named John who
00:36:44
really taught me that relationships are so key to
00:36:48
everything we do.
00:36:48
And it sounds very simple because in life we all have
00:36:51
relationships.
00:36:52
But it's those relationships that matter, that tie us through
00:36:55
, and there's ones where I think , for anyone listening who's
00:36:59
younger in their career, you may have an inaction with someone
00:37:03
five years ago that you think you'll never see again and then,
00:37:06
15 years later, they call you up and say I need someone that
00:37:10
does what you do, and you may be surprised by that phone call,
00:37:14
but it's because you had an impact on that person 15 years
00:37:17
ago.
00:37:18
Maciej: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Peter.
00:37:20
Thank you so so much for joining me on the podcast.
00:37:23
I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, Wishing you all
00:37:27
the best and to a simile in the future, Looking forward to
00:37:32
seeing the news who the partner of the year is going to be at
00:37:35
your kickoff.
00:37:37
Peter Hancock: I have some bets out there, yeah.
00:37:39
Maciej: I bet you people are betting internally of who that's
00:37:43
going to be and a lot of the sales reps are probably doing
00:37:46
everything that it is the partner that they look after,
00:37:49
right?
00:37:50
Peter Hancock: Yes, exactly this has been a pleasure.
00:37:52
I love sharing the story and sharing our journey and
00:37:56
hopefully this is good content for you and I appreciate the
00:38:03
time.
00:38:04
Maciej: Thank you so much, peter .
00:38:05
Thank you, and that's a wrap for this episode.
00:38:11
I do hope you found it valuable and, if you did, please make
00:38:15
sure to subscribe and leave a review.
00:38:16
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00:38:20
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00:38:24
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00:38:27
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00:38:31
I appreciate you tuning in today Until next time, thank you.