Strategies for Effective Channel Marketing and Sales Enablement
Barry Mueller Good evening. So I'm Barry Mueller product marketer. Lead at Demostack, not heard of Demostack, so Demostack empowers everyone, including partners to deliver custom, reliable, and up to date demos to accelerate revenue growth.
I met Sarah Goldstein, I think, nearly a year ago after she became a Demostack customer, and it's been great to watch her journey from the sidelines. I think it's been really fun to see and also hear about stories I actually never heard about for specific product market motions or to go to market motions.
I don't really know anyone else who could actually even deliver this type of webinar. So I'm really excited to have Sarah where we're gonna today talk about CYREBRO's transition to indirect sales and the five main block building blocks for them to build that channel marketing and channels sales enablement program that Sarah built with her team.
And yeah, so Sarah, maybe you could take a few minutes and introduce yourself. Sure.
[00:01:38] Sarah Goldstein: So thanks for having me. Like Barry said, I have been happily working with Demostack a bit for about over a year now. So I was happy to join and share whatever I can about the kind of transition from direct to indirect go to market.
So I'm the head of product marketing and channel marketing at CYREBRO. I've worked, been at CYREBRO about three years. And I've worked in and around kind of high tech startups for about 10 years now focusing on really building product marketing functions from the ground up and hopefully to be able to scale.
Overview of CYREBRO's Service Offerings
[00:02:10] Barry Mueller: Awesome. And maybe can you tell us a little bit about CYREBRO, where you've been for three years?
[00:02:14] Sarah Goldstein: Sure. So CYREBRO is a managed detection and response solution. We leverage AI and ML to deliver advanced precision threat detection and rapid incident response. Our unique angle as compared to our competitors is that we have an interactive SAS platform.
That allows our end users to engage with their threat investigations in the cerebral platform. The ones that we perform and they can communicate directly with their security teams or our security team on the platform. So that also is very much why we use a tool like Demostack, cause we have a great platform that we really want to showcase.
First and foremost,
[00:02:50] Barry Mueller: awesome. And I assume it's cyber
[00:02:53] Sarah Goldstein: yep. Cyber security.
[00:02:54] Barry Mueller: All right. Perfect. The blue background branding is cyber cool. So that's, thanks for the background. I just also want to remind everyone here one, tell us where you're located and Throughout where you're located, but also if you have any questions for Sarah, I'll be looking at the chat throughout and our moderators in the green room will also be helping with the chat.
So feel free to ask questions that we can try out. Hey, Dan outside Washington that we can answer even during the presentation. I think it's. Will be really interesting. So let's start with the reverse transition to indirect sales from direct sales. How did that start and how are you involved?
The Transition to Indirect Sales Channels at CYREBRO
[00:03:34] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah so it doesn't happen overnight. And there definitely are a lot of lessons learned along the way that I'll share. We started the transition about two years ago. So Generally, in the market, cybersecurity companies are increasingly moving towards a channel focused approach, especially North America and our target audience, which is largely SMBs.
So we also have enterprise customers as well. They utilize what's called managed service providers or managed security service providers. So MSPs or MSPs these service providers take care of them. It and security needs instead of the company needing to manage it and supply it in house. So really the way to connect with our target audience is through these M.
S. P. S. Who are channel partners? And so that essentially led us to our kind of channel. First go to market
[00:04:24] Barry Mueller: and then Yeah. And you're a product marketer as am I. How are our jobs different considering that your motion is indirect sales and we work mostly with direct sales?
[00:04:37] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah, it was definitely a learning experience.
Like I said, I was brought on at CYREBRO because of my experience in product marketing and we quickly understood that Channels was going to be a major, if not, which it now is the full focus in terms of our business model. It was definitely a learning process, like I said and I quickly grew to manage channel marketing as well.
So when the company decided to be 100 percent channel focused, it meant from a marketing standpoint, we needed to review our entire marketing strategy. And rebuild it from the ground up. Things like, from a product marketer standpoint, having a defined ICP, your ideal customer profile that helps you define the messaging and the segmentation, the use cases, pain points, all of those things.
We basically needed to revisit everything, recreate the ICP and duplicate it for partners. So from a product marketing standpoint, you need this. It still does the segmentation customization assets. But now essentially doing it twice. So you've got your end users and you've got your partner. So you're selling through partners to end users.
So it's essentially like doubling everything you're doing. Yeah,
[00:05:46] Barry Mueller: Product marketers don't have that enough work anyways. So might as well just double it, okay. So maybe before we start into the presentation maybe you could tell us some of the first steps, like how you began things like that.
[00:05:57] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. So before we even get in, like you said, to the building blocks that I would recommend any company looking to do this would have this as their kind of initial first steps. We really wanted to understand what we were doing? Because the company was selling direct for a number of years.
So it was really like taking a look in the mirror. Who are we? And where do we need to fill in the gaps? The first thing I would recommend doing, the first thing we did is bringing in people who know what we're doing. This area. We hired a very experienced channel marketing manager pretty quickly.
She's been pivotal in understanding things like what the partners want, how they work, what motivates them, how do we speak to them? As well as we did a bit of outside consulting as well to review our business plans and go to markets and understand, okay, what do we need to add both to our marketing and our Salesforce in terms of, Personnel and expertise as well as processes and operations to make sure that we have the foundation set up.
So I would say surround yourself with people who know what they're doing. Before you start, you jump headfirst into this.
[00:06:56] Barry Mueller: Love that. Okay, great. So I think we can start sharing the slides. I think if someone is listening also that hasn't already had a partner program, this is a great time to revisit some of those foundations, I would say.
Yeah. They're the foundations then even more important after your life to do that reset. Sarah, do you need us to screen share or would you like? Yeah, if you can
[00:07:19] Sarah Goldstein: share, that'd be good.
[00:07:23] Barry Mueller: Let me grab that.
All right. Here we go.
All right. Can you see? There it is. All right. Perfect. So you talked about the transition to indirect sales. Now we're going to do the 5 blocks for a channel program.
Key Strategies for Building Channel Marketing and Sales Enablement
[00:08:01] Sarah Goldstein: For kind of panel enablement, or from a channel program perspective, we understood there's 5 areas that are really important to cover.
It's this checklist that you've got to have these things, no matter who we talk to. They would ask us the same questions. The same, four or five questions in order to really build like a scalable Channel program to enable our partners to sell our product. So the first place and a product marketer will recognize this.
I mentioned it before is defining your IPP or your ideal partner profile. So you need to know who your ideal partner type is. There's a lot of different types of partners out there. You have big distributors that work globally across markets. You've got value added resellers. You have the MSPs and MSPs that I mentioned.
So you've got a lot of different partners. So you want to identify who is the one that's really going to fit both kind of your solution, your service, your product, whatever you're offering, as well as will help you reach the customers that You want to reach so identifying them and creating those personas, like you would do with your target audience, your end user helps you then, you segment and you customize depending on.
The different personas within that partner profile, decision makers influencers, the day to day users and then you start building out, what are their goals, what are their pain points and the messaging for these partners. But an important thing to do is also understand how does your product or service fit into their portfolio of offerings?
How do they benefit from selling Cirebro? Because at the end of the day, they're also a business. And as great as your product or solution is, it needs to fit within the other suite of solutions they're offering to their customers. So that was really critical. So developing the messaging to target partners and help them attract prospects as well as help them sell to their existing clients is really important.
And this is a key to. Step three is a little teaser to developing step three of this channel enablement success plan. So we'll put it
[00:09:59] Barry Mueller: above it. I love that line. Like, how do they benefit? These are usually things that we think about our customers, but we have to think about for the partners. How do they benefit?
Cause they could probably use a competitor or an indirect competitor. How can I get rid of them? And get that attention. Definitely. Cool. Go with slide two.
Detailed Breakdown of CYREBRO’s Channel Marketing Efforts
[00:10:21] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. So the second part is training your partners as an extension of your sales team. So you need to start thinking that your sales force, your sales organization has just a Not even doubled, but it's grown exponentially.
When you start thinking of the sales people in your partners organizations as your sales team it will help you start to visualize and map what you need to do and how to enable them. But in order to do that, you really need to have what I call a strong sense of self.
Because you're no longer a product marketer or channel enabler. You're no longer just explaining to your own internal sales team the value proposition and how we define ourselves and the mission and all of the, the use cases you need to then share it twofold, threefold to a, an audience that is not in your organization and there's sometimes a few degrees away from you as well.
So it's so important to know what our value proposition is? What is the messaging we use? What don't we use? What are our differentiators? And then communicate it to your partners and not just once or twice, but regularly. So we created a partner training program where we have an LMS or a learning management system where we have technical training and a sales training currently, and a small marketing training.
Because basically you want an onboarding process for them where they come in and they immediately start learning about your product or service. They need to know how to sell your solution, how to use your product, how to demo everything that you would train your own sales org. And you need to have it in a place that's centralized and easy for them to access.
So we set up a process of. Videos for them to go through with quizzes. And they actually get a, CYREBRO certified partner certificate to show that they are then ready to to sell. And then, to do regular updates like you would your sales team. So if there's feature releases or product updates to do regular, webinars and communication to not just communicate to your sales org, what the updates are, but, The partners need to know how am I selling this new feature?
What's the benefit to my users or prospects? So that's really. Really critical. And it's challenging because you've now added a few more concentric circles to the people that you need to be speaking to. So letting go of control is something that we, I had to learn to do. You're not going to be able to control everything that the partner is saying to their prospects.
What they're saying in sales calls, you're not going to have insight to a lot of that. Those communications. So the more you can give them and the more clear you can be in who you are and how your product benefits their clients, the more they're going to use what you give them and not improvise on their own.
So that's, it's important, but it's learning to let go a little, which For marketing can be tricky, but
[00:13:10] Barry Mueller: it's good practice, right? That's part of this balance of what you're used to, like things that you can control, you can listen to that gone call, you can listen to, and you can say, Oh, maybe here's a better way to sell better, and now you're just getting partners specifically, there's a lot of lack of visibility.
From a data perspective and definitely from a demo perspective,
[00:13:34] Sarah Goldstein: definitely
[00:13:35] Barry Mueller: a lot of sense. We'll go to the next slide.
[00:13:39] Sarah Goldstein: Okay. This is what I referred to before. So you are now doubling up on your sales enablement materials. All of the the kind of the IPP or the personas that you created for your partners and that you obviously have for your end users as well.
You now need to create materials to sell to your partners and then sell through your partners to your end users. So you take all that messaging and you start creating the collateral that in product marketing, we're very familiar with your brochures, one pagers, sales decks anything and everything.
So I would say even before you do that, you need to communicate the marketing guidelines to the partners. So you're going to be giving them. Brochures to sell, for example, to sell CYREBRO, but we want to maintain some kind of brand consistency and brand identity because it's still important to have brand awareness for our company, even if we're selling indirectly.
So in our training, like I said, we also have marketing guidelines. Here are the logos that you can use. Here are the images. Here's the messaging. And. A lot of partners will take that and create their own collateral and they'll even create web pages and whole websites based on your product.
So as just an anecdote, we've, I've seen like a whole range of different websites that partners have created for, to sell CYREBRO. They're basically taking your solution and they're putting it within their suite of or their portfolio of offerings, and then they're putting their messaging on top of it, because at the end of the day, that service provider is the one selling, so it needs to come from them.
But I have seen partners who will down to the last little bit of HTML code. They've copied our website completely. It was amazing and then translated it to, Spanish, Portuguese, German And we've seen the other end where they have our brand colors are like a teal and a blue and a purple, and they have made websites showcasing, cause I rewrote with orange and yellow and red and using all sorts of images that they found online.
Like I said, you have to let go of control a little bit, but it's. The more guidance and guidelines you give them the better, because you do want to maintain that brand consistency. So then, like I said, you need to create all of these sell to and sell through materials. So you're selling to the partners, your first real client.
Or kind of end user is the partner. You need to convince the partner why they should partner with your organization. What are the benefits from a sometimes commercial standpoint? What's the value? What are they going to get at the end of the day? The bottom line by partnering with your organization.
So you create. Partner program brochures and partner recruitment decks and all of those materials, once you've got them signed in and onboarded, you're then giving them the sell through materials, which is like I said the brochures for end users with the different use cases, case studies, all of that.
It's a lot more, content and assets that you need to start developing and creating this machine to produce it. And then you need to localize it. So you might have partners in lots of different regions, and the benefit is that those partners are more local and they are, speaking to the customers directly in the not literal language, but sometimes literal language that they, So we have partners in North America, in Latin America, in EMEA, APAC, all over the world.
So we try to localize as much as possible because we're, then we're still maintaining messaging and brand consistency and everything, but you lose a little bit of it along the way. I've seen assets come back in all sorts of languages, but The more you give them, the better the partners. They really are hungry for sales materials and anything you'll give them to help sell.
So the more you can localize the more they're actually going to leverage it.
[00:17:22] Barry Mueller: Yeah, I feel like if you see someone localizing something, that means that they want to partner with you.
[00:17:27] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah.
[00:17:27] Barry Mueller: If they're trying at least.
[00:17:29] Sarah Goldstein: Definitely. I
[00:17:30] Barry Mueller: had a question on the, with regards to localization specifically, and this is like a go to market question.
If your product isn't localized, let's say your product is only in English.
[00:17:45] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah.
[00:17:46] Barry Mueller: Does it make sense for companies to sell in the given language of their country? What's, what have you seen in that?
[00:17:52] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah, it's a good question. I, it's really case by case, but for example our platform at this very moment is only in English.
We do have support in multiple languages. We have salespeople in channel managers, CSMs in different regions who speak the local languages. But at this very moment the platform is in English. I would say a lot of cyber security tools. Maintain a lot of English regardless.
But I will say with AI it is much easier to leverage the AI for translation. So we actually are in the process of making a call, I'm sure there's probably not any CYREBRO clients on this call, but not making any promises, but we are, in the process of localizing and translating all of our.
The platform itself. So investigation summaries that you get, you would get them in your language. Any like mitigation steps to remediate against cyber threats, you would get them in your local language. So it's not exactly the answer to your question, but it is something that we're starting to see, last year and this year, that's going to help.
You heard it here first
[00:18:56] Barry Mueller: localization.
[00:18:58] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. The more, the better, but it is a challenge and it's also about setting expectations with the partners that they will have some materials localized as much as possible, especially when you're not a huge company, every bro's still a startup. So we do what we can.
But I think having support in their language, support teams and their language has been super super beneficial. So you. You do as much as you can,
[00:19:22] Barry Mueller: right? Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. Anyways, if there's any listeners here and you want to have your own press release in a live webinar with them, please let us know.
[00:19:32] Sarah Goldstein: Oh boy. Getting myself in trouble.
[00:19:35] Barry Mueller: All right, cool. I thought that was super interesting. So thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about partner portals.
Importance of Partner Portals in Channel Marketing
[00:19:41] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. So this is the big one. This is, if you talk to anyone, you talk to a partner, anyone who's experience in the growing a partner program.
They asked you to have a partner portal. There's a lot of reasons that you need a partner portal. But essentially you want to have a central place for all things channels. Remember that your channel partners are not internal employees in your company, so they won't have access to whether you have G suite or Microsoft 365 with SharePoint.
They're not going to have access to those those repositories. So you want to create a place where they can get all of the collateral, any news updates It's really important. They're able to register and track deals. I think that was the first thing we built. We did like an in-house site that was just for deal registration.
So the partners, they want to be sure that if they're bringing in leads and they're bringing in new clients throughout that sales cycle, they want that deal to be. Protected and registered to them. Meaning they're not going to be competing with other partners for that client. So it's really important to have a place for deal registration.
It's also important that you, as a vendor, are able to see what your pipeline is with partners, because. They also don't have access to whether you're a CRM, whether you're Salesforce or whatever else you're using. They don't have Salesforce users, so you're not seeing leads that they're generating and you're not seeing opportunities coming in and an activity.
So when they register a deal. You can start tracking that you can start understanding the pipeline that a partner is building. You can understand if they are an active partner. It's really critical to be able to measure if your partners are active or not. Some partners get really excited and they start and they're going to sell, they're going to bring a lot of deals.
And then after three months, you Crickets, you've got nothing. So it's a really important way to be measuring the activity of your partners and know who you want to enable further. Who do you want to give a marketing budget to? Who do you want to do, webinars with? Who are you going to help them grow their business?
So the partner portal is really critical for that. It's also where you can put your training, your, how's your training? Currently our training is. In a separate application. But I hope at some point we can consolidate and put them in one place. We have our onboarding process built out of the partner portal.
Remember again that these are not part of your internal company. So they're not getting all of these. They're not going through the onboarding process to learn about your company. So you need to make sure that from the day that the partner signs the agreement and they sign And start building that relationship that you have a process for them to learn about the organization and learn how to sell, we teach them how to sell CYREBRO, how to walkthroughs of the platform, how to demo.
So we built up an automated process so that there are certain triggers and there are certain steps. And then after. for 90 days, we expect a partner to go through that onboarding process and we can actually track it in the partner portal. So you're seeing them bring in deals, but you're also seeing them complete training and you're seeing them.
Access different assets and download brochures or other knowledge related materials. So this was definitely a, we had a lot of friction with the partner portal, like I said, the first one we built was in house, but it was difficult for us to grow in and manage that.
So we ended up going to a third party provider and then Had that for about a year. And then last year decided to consolidate further and build it on top of Salesforce. So we have built and rebuilt partner portals constantly. And I would say that to learn from our. Mistake is to choose a product or a partner portal.
That's going to scale with your business. Choose one that integrates with your CRM that has the option to house all of your sales collateral that can connect to your training platform. If you use an external one, that can track onboarding. And as you Scale and hopefully bring in more partners choose one that isn't going to charge you a hefty fee for Adding in more users because you don't want to be limited to the number of users.
You want anyone and everyone in the partner organization to be able to access what you've built. So really being careful about choosing the right solution. Not just for right now, but for the future is something that we learned the hard way, that's a part of the fun, so yeah, the partner portal is, it's critical.
[00:23:57] Barry Mueller: I think we'll now move to a topic that's dear to me for some reason. It's not because there were demos in my, on my shirt. But it's the demo environment. I actually think I'm going to stop screen sharing and ask you some of the questions so we can have it more face to face. But as I mentioned earlier, Sarah and I met after Sarah became a customer of Demostack.
Up until now, I've learned so much. Demos, I can Pretend at least to have a conversation with you and learn more about it. So tell me, is the demo environment, is that something that you've managed for Cirebro or indirect partners?
The Role of Demos in Sales Enablement
[00:24:37] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. Product marketing has always owned the demo platform.
It's different from organization to organization, but I believe it's something product marketing should own. I think it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we originally built it. We had an in house platform that we started with before we got to where we are today.
[00:24:57] Barry Mueller: Is it? Can you share some of the pain points around that?
And how's a platform that brought you to the Demostack?
[00:25:03] Sarah Goldstein: Sure. So there are definitely pros and cons. Obviously you can see where we fell because we went with, we tried a number of different solutions and landed with Demostack. But so for product led companies, especially like CYREBRO with an engaging platform, it's Really critical for us that partners can run demos for prospects.
So we, like I said, originally had an in house, we have a platform. We basically created a slightly more isolated environment that we could run demos on. The bed like the benefits of that are you have a platform that really reflects the demo platform one to one reflects the actual platform. So any updates to, feature updates, new releases are going to be reflected in the demo environment immediately, which brings us to the the downside is that anything that's You know, if there are bugs, if there are tests that R and D is running, if there are any issues, those are also reflected in the demo environment and you lose control and you don't have a isolated kind of area to show prospects the great things about CYREBRO without kind of hiding behind the curtain.
But, You release a new feature and there's, sometimes bugs and sometimes things you need to work out the kinks a little bit. We had a hard time With that environment only because I was not able to go in directly and make changes. Only like our R and D team was able to do that and they've got enough on their plate as is.
So to have marketing knocking on their door every other day saying, can you remove this test? Can you change this? There's, gibberish text here and there. I need it clean. It really wasn't workable. And then when we transitioned to be The channel focused go to market. We understood that all of a sudden the use of the demo platform is, has grown exponentially.
And so now you've got a lot more eyes on this environment that we've lost some control over. So that's, I would say after about six to eight months, we understood we needed a new solution.
[00:27:09] Barry Mueller: Yeah, no, that, that's something that we see a lot with companies with just having a direct sales process, but all the pain points around a direct sales process with demos are multifold with indirect and working with channel partners.
That makes a lot of sense.
[00:27:25] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah.
[00:27:26] Barry Mueller: And then you mentioned that you looked at a few demo providers. Maybe you could expand on that and what made it was specifically interesting about Demostack.
How CYREBRO uses Demostack
[00:27:34] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. So we're looking, our platform is very interactive and dynamic. And the idea is not to have a dashboard, but we wanted something that we did not want.
Our platform is something that our users interact with and they engage with. We needed something like that. Not only looked like our platform, but acted like our platform as well. So we looked at a number of different solutions. A lot of them felt like it. Beefed up screenshots like screenshots of the animations.
And when we tried out Demostack, it was really the closest we got to our actual platforms like the, how it performs. It was like, 95, 99%. The same. And then that was like in the initial clone that we did, we got super, super close to the actual performance of our platform. And, on those calls, the team at Demostack said, yeah, sure.
We can, the other things we can fix. No problem. We can help you with this, this is how you would do it. This is how you would go in and do edits yourself. So it was really like a clear choice for us. I'll even say like our head of R and D joined one of the demos we did with Demostack and was.
Blown away, they were able to build something like this. For me, that was a good indicator. So yeah, it was easy enough to clone. And the functionality of our platform was there. We didn't lose any of the performance or how a user would actually engage with the platform, which is, like I said, was really important to us.
[00:29:04] Barry Mueller: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And then this is more of a partner question than a demo question, but like, why is it even so important to get partners? The demo can't a partner just be used for distribution if you're anyways, co selling and then they just have your sales team give the demo on the first call on their first
[00:29:23] Sarah Goldstein: call.
You could do that. But I wouldn't say it's necessarily the best way, especially with a product led company that really has. A great looking platform that they want to showcase. We wanted to make our partner ecosystem an extension of our sales team. We wanted to train them how to sell and selling means demoing the platform.
Very quickly in the sales cycle, the end users actually see how the platform looks, see a demo of it. It was really critical that it was part of the sales cycle. So we needed it. A solution that we would be able to give not just to our sales force, but like I said, that exponential growth of, all that additional concentric circle of partner salespeople.
We needed something that they could access. relatively easy. The process of generating tons of users or, scaling out that demo environment, which before I would have to grant access to every user and I would have to make sure they can see it and limit their kind of configure their user.
And now I basically can give them a link and they're good to go.
[00:30:31] Barry Mueller: Love that. I'm going to talk for a few minutes and some of these actually might even be announcements for you there about selling a Demostack that's really caught our eye. We talked to Sarah and we've actually talked to multiple of our customers, a multitude of customers who are using Demostack for partners and are, and swear by it in the sense of.
Getting their partners to demo for the first time or getting their partners to demo multiple demos. So there's actually some, our product team is actually working on creating the partners use case. And making it more sophisticated and more interesting. So for example in the coming quarter we're going to have bulk editing for multiple Workspaces.
So for example, if you have 200 partners partner orgs and each of them has 10 users You're now able to if your app updates and you want or if you want them to show a different product Like let's say you have two different products And you want them to show a multitude of products, you're able to instead of copying and pasting into 200 different workspaces you can just do it once.
So it's like building these roles and demo governance for partners, which I think is unique in the demo space that people aren't focused enough on right now, and that we see that's a real big pain in the environment. We've also seen that people are using Demostack and this is, and I think we could actually talk about this, Sarah you mentioned that one of the ways that people are working or are engaged is because they're submitting opportunities.
Is that correct? Maybe give us 30 seconds about what that processes.
[00:32:08] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah, sure. So basically our partners have their own clients that they work with and then they prospect for clients as well. So basically they'll bring in a lead. They register in our deal registration within the, in the partner portal and then we see it right away.
And then they have 90 days of exclusivity for that lead. And so we can see the pipeline that they're generating. Yeah. And
[00:32:36] Barry Mueller: Do they start submitting that or registering the op right away when they start the sales process? Or is it something that they,
[00:32:43] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah, so they Ideally, they've gone through a qualification process.
We don't want them just submitting. Registering any old lead, they need to have shown that they have had an initial communication with this lead. They've seen that there's. There's interest. Ideally they've gotten farther along, closer to a proposal but there needs to be shown engagement with this prospect before they're registering because then also at that point That means that other partners who might be in that kind of geographic region or that space, they can't go after that same client.
So they get exclusivity. But it also means that CYREBRO sale team is jumping into help as well. And invest in this lead. So we want to know that it's been qualified up to a certain point.
[00:33:36] Barry Mueller: Yeah, totally makes sense. That's one thing that we have some customers using Demostack for, is to get that visibility early on through the demo data, happens to be through demo data, but the idea is if someone is demoing a product or your product, then they it can be gated or it can be through your user accounts and they can actually understand, oh this partner in Latin America demoed.
Not only do I, so I see that they're demoing before they registered it and that can help me with forecasting and I can also see what and who was demoing and there with that information you can create like business insights, does this partner need more enablement? I see that they're demoing a lot, but they're not opening so many ops.
Or do I notice that this partner is only showing 1/3rd of our product, maybe but the companies, the partners that show 3/3rds of our product or all of our product that we want them to show are winning. So let's bring that message to the C player partners, a lot of customers that are interested in getting their C players to be players.
So saying what was the best demo given and also seeing the visibility early on in the sales process.
[00:34:47] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah. I think that you mentioned that situation where partners are bringing in a lot of opportunities, but they're not closing. That's a huge indicator. That's been something that, if we had that kind of analytics or that kind of visibility that would definitely help us optimize and know where to spend our time and which partners to, to invest in and, what to do, what not to do.
That would be kind of that'd be great.
[00:35:11] Barry Mueller: So yeah, so that actually Sarah's happy to say is live. Is it recently so we can work together on and get to say we were on that part. I think the last two use cases before we answer any more questions I see that there are questions. So that's awesome.
Thanks for putting that in everyone, but tours for enablement and tours for marketing assets. Some use cases are that people are training their partners on what to demo and what to say when they're showing that specific feature, maybe they want them to talk about the value and not the actual feature when they click on it.
For example, so people are sending product tours called interactive product demos with some of our competitors and they're sending that to the partners, putting down the LMS, for example, so that they have that training and then actually giving them a product where to put on their website so that they're happier that they actually have more marketing assets and that they.
Feel like they can show the cyber broken product from their website without even talking to someone. So the same way that companies are using product tours to talk about their product without getting on the phone. So now your partners can also do that. Pretty unlimited. So I'm going to go to the Q and thank you Dan for your question.
Do you give partners access to demo environments? How much control do they have to customize them?
[00:36:29] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. So they, they have the, they have, I don't know if it's necessarily the demo environment, we call it the demo environment, but they basically have the link to go in and run through a demo at the moment we don't give the partner users access to customize it's something we've definitely talked about a lot with Demostack because giving them users would then allow us to see a lot more of what they're doing when they're demoing and have that kind of.
user level data, which would be really helpful even if it's on an account level. I think that'd be really great for us. I think it's something that What we've done in the past year is really understanding that customer, that partner profile a lot more. So we have focus and kind of priority partners that we want to enable.
So that I think would be a great place to start by giving those partners who really know Sirebro and they're bringing in deals and we want to enable them, access to Demostack and then they can further customize and then That can be a, like a beta test for us to see if that's something that really drives value before we expand to the full partner ecosystem.
So to create partner tiers in that way.
[00:37:36] Barry Mueller: I love that. I think the way I look at customizing is you have demo templates, like you have custom demo templates for industries or personas, and then you have that like extra flair of personalization, like logo, customer name, and then people feel like it's being talked to them even more so because they're And information is within it.
Love that. By the way, Sarah, if you want to also choose your six questions. If you want to choose a question that speaks to you more than other questions, I'm happy for you too.
[00:38:06] Sarah Goldstein: I'll let you pick the next one. It's going to take me a second to open up this the Q&A.
[00:38:12] Barry Mueller: So April asked, have you started using syndicated content, excuse me, at all with partners?
Why or why not?
[00:38:20] Sarah Goldstein: We haven't. It's really I would say just a resource lack of bandwidth reason. It's definitely something that we would like to try to work into this year. But like I said, where we built the foundation of the partner program, we're identifying our part, our kind of priority and focus partners, and we're understanding now how we enable those partner tiers that we break it down into.
So that's definitely something that I think maybe towards the end of the year, we can look into.
[00:38:53] Barry Mueller: Yeah, makes sense. While you're looking for the next question, I'll address Taryn's question. How does Demostack compare to PipeDrive as a sales CRM to track and measure partner activity? I can't speak to PipeDrive but I can speak to CRM or PRMs.
Demostack's goal isn't to replace your partner relationship management Portal or your classic partner portals. Our goal is to give you sales or like deal activity intent within the demos, and then let you double click into that and see how people are demoing and what they're demoing and who they're demoing to.
So it can tell you, for example who is being shown a demo and how many demos were shown in any timeframe, But I'm sure that, but it's not a classic serum that you can put first name, last name how many times were they contacted? What did you email? Demostack isn't a serum. I would look at it more as A sales enablement platform in that context for visibility.
And we integrate within like Salesforce and HubSpot. So then you can start making those business insights connections. Oh, they did this demo and that was the demo that won. And we've seen that people that did that type of demo had a higher percentage of winning than people that did that type of one demo.
So that's the context there. I hope that makes sense. If not, feel free to chat.
[00:40:11] Sarah Goldstein: There's a question here from Ryan where I touched on a bit of it and I'll go into more detail. So he says, do you have partner tiers where more support, enablement and or engagement from Cerebral Resources is available to the kind of larger, more important partners?
How do you determine what the base good enough level of enablement is for new partners to get started and I guess incentivize them to grow? It's a great question. It's something we have still been figuring out. Over the last two years and experimenting with different things. Initially we wanted to set up partner tiers like actual partner tiers that were external facing, silver, gold, platinum, something like that.
We have it somewhat defined internally where we think we would go with that. But initially our partner program or kind of our ecosystem wasn't mature enough to define it like that. But we're getting to the point now where I think we're going to release partner tiers at some point soon.
We have like internally. Definitely the partners that we focus on more. We identify them internally as focus or priority partners. These are partners that have X amount of opportunities. They've generated X amount of pipeline potential revenue over the course of, one month, three months, whatever.
We have a lot of ways to measure it, but there's also a lot that's qualitative. So I would say at least for our focus partners, their criteria is they need to have a marketing person on the other end if we're going to enable them with co marketing because, A lot of it is like the, it's like the chicken or the egg.
If the partner is not going to really start selling unless they see that you bring them leads. But you don't want to focus, or sink a lot of your resources into that partner until you see that they can generate leads. So it's there's always a push and pull of, how much do we feed them leads?
How much do we expect them to bring X number of leads in the first place? 90 days they're selling. Criteria like they went through the onboarding process. They went through the sales training. We then will sometimes do an offsite or rather an onsite offline onsite sales training where we'll actually send one of our salespeople to your organization for a day or two and do more in depth training.
We have SPFs and incentives that we incentivize their salespeople with. We will offer them discounts or they're called SPFs, but like bonuses. If they bring an X number of sales in a certain period of time, we run contests to see who can bring in the most leads.
So there's definitely ways to incentivize them. Financially is usually the best. That's what speaks to them. That's their bottom line. That's why they're partnering with us at the end of the day. It's a business opportunity for them. So we're still really in the process of Understanding the best way to define the partner tiers.
But then, yeah, we will give, there'll be different levels of support. They'll have access to bigger co marketing budgets. It's called MDF. So it's market development funds, which we essentially give them X amount, whether it's, they get 10 percent or 5 percent of their Transcribed The revenue that they're driving for the year, we'll give them 5 percent of that.
In cash to run marketing events, to generate more leads and prospects for CYREBRO. So there's a whole range of things that you can do. I would say something that we struggle with, this is a long answer. Is really setting up those measurable criteria from the get go. Sometimes you change them.
Sometimes you understand KPIs for partners that don't work so well, but the more you're measuring their engagement and activity in the sales they're bringing in, and the more you can compare it to other partners, the sooner, the better. Cause it's giving you a measure of your success and your potential success for the course of the year.
That is something I would recommend.
[00:43:50] Barry Mueller: Cool. Love it. I think if you have any other questions, Sarah, what's the best way that people can reach you?
[00:43:56] Sarah Goldstein: You can definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. Send me a message. I will respond, happy to connect, happy to hear suggestions for people who have built channel programs and work in, channel marketing, or have more questions. I'm happy to share more detail about partner portals we worked with, stuff that worked, stuff that didn't.
Feel free to reach out.
[00:44:16] Barry Mueller: Yeah, I love it. And if anyone has any suggestions, this was actually our first time doing a webinar that wasn't mostly about Demostack, but was about the whole motion. So thanks, Sarah, for being on that journey with me. Sure. I hope it brought value. I definitely, I, it must have brought value.
I learned a lot. And from the questions, it's clear that people were interested. And so yeah, so let us have any feedback. And if you have any questions about the partner use case, almost that obviously reach out. So to wrap it up, thank you so much, Sarah. We really appreciate you as a customer and as a new friend.
And I'm looking forward to continuing that relationship and continuing the Demostack relationship. And thanks again for joining in teaching us.
[00:44:59] Sarah Goldstein: Yeah. Thank you. Happy to join.
[00:45:02] Barry Mueller: All right. Perfect.
[00:45:04] Sarah Goldstein: Thanks.
