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Today’s show featured an interview with Sales Leader John Carey, VP WW Alliances & Channels at SAS.
Find John on LinkedIn.
JOHN’S ADVICE: “Stay abreast of the industry news. Find out what your customers are reading or listening to in order to better understand them. Sales is always going to be, whether it’s virtual or physical, a person-to-person activity. If we can be authentic and customer-focused, with that knowledge behind us so that we earn the value that we bring in order to have that engagement with the client, it’s a winning strategy.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re talking today with John Carey, VP of global channels at SAS. We’re going to be talking about what it takes to be an exceptional partner professional, someone working in the partner in the channel. John, why don’t you give us a brief introduction and then I’m looking forward to getting deep into this topic.
John Carey: Fred, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invite. I’m a 20 plus year veteran of the channel. I actually started out in a sales operations role. I grew up around the data and from the data I got interested in thinking about how the business runs, and when it came to the part of the business I was most interested in, it was the attraction of the win-win opportunity of working with partners. Also, the idea that you always had more resources to go and pursue your objective when you are working with partner organizations than if you were solo or dependent upon the constantly reducing resources in every corporate environment. That’s what got me into that.
I’m excited to talk about tips that I may have learned. I’m excited to learn from the tips that have already been recorded, as well as I’m excited to hear about your stories.
Fred Diamond: A little bit of a tidbit here. My MBA thesis was on channel theory and design when I worked at Apple Computer way back in the day, and got my MBA at San Jose State University. I was deep into channel theory and all those kinds of things. For people who may not know who are listening, define the channel. Define what it means. What does the channel mean? We have sales professionals listening all over the globe, so that they understand what you do, who you manage, and how important those entities are to SAS.
John Carey: I’ll give you my definition. I’m sure there are plenty of books and recordings where you can hear this, but for me, the channel is influencing companies and employees that you cannot control to get excited about pursuing successful outcomes with customers, with the products and solutions that you as a vendor create. Obviously, from a business perspective, it’s a really positive story for SG&A numbers, sales and general administration costs, because selling through a channel is usually a very cost-effective sale. Because you’ve a whole bunch of bodies that you are not paying for traditionally as burden cogs helping you to actually put your message out in market, work with your clients, help your clients achieve success, all without you having to staff every single one of those roles from technical pre-sales through to delivery. Even as customer successes emerge as the new management theory for how we maintain a subscription base and grow that subscription base, more and more partners building out customer success resources so that vendors reach can extend even further. That’s what I think of when I think of channel.
When I think of the SAS channel, we have industry knowledgeable and data and AI skilled partners who help customers realize outcomes with our Viya platform and with our Viya-based solutions. There’s a almost 50-year legacy within SAS of working within data and AI and delivering these solutions and evolving these solutions with some of the toughest customers out there, the biggest banks in the world, the biggest governments in the world. Working on risk fraud, compliance, working with our CI 360 solution around how we can be effective with audience management, how we can be effective in actually helping you get your customer the right offer at the right time. Then with our Viya platform, we’re seeing increasing development of use cases that are applicable across multiple industries, telco, energy. We look at the supply chain, manufacturing, retail. It’s a great place to be and our partners marry that industry knowledge with technical capability to really understand the client and navigate them to a positive outcome.
Fred Diamond: For people listening as well, in many cases, the channel’s already there. That is how the customer is interacting and the channel needs to figure out historically how to work with companies like SAS. SAS of course has to work optimally. It’s been a constant refinement for a whole bunch of different reasons. I’m excited to get deep into it. I’m just curious, what is the best professional advice you’ve ever received?
John Carey: I have a great mentor, Steve Garside, who was the VP of System Engineers at Citrix, where I worked for a number of years. He was the first person that pulled me aside and said, “Hey, if you are confused or frustrated by a colleague or even a customer’s behavior, find out how they get paid. Nine times out of 10, their behavior will suddenly seem totally rational.” People are motivated by how they earn. If you can understand that, it can save you a lot of craziness and wondering. I use that a lot when I’m mentoring, is, “Hey, if you’re frustrated with an individual, go find out what their pay plan is. Are they trying to upset you or are they being paid to fight for objectives that don’t seem to be aligned for you?” That can help to get to a negotiation.
The other one I would add there is, and again, I’ve been very lucky in my career. Mistakes have always been encouraged when you demonstrate that they’re used as a learning opportunity. I often see people go, “Go fast, fail quick.” That’s great, but only if you learn from that failure. I think sometimes we forget the rest of the sentence. Go fast, fail quick, learn, repeat without that same failure. I was lucky enough to work with great people who allowed me to make pretty much every mistake I could. But were with me by my side, helped me to examine what the mistake was and what I could learn from that mistake. I tried never to repeat the same mistake twice.
Fred Diamond: I loved both answers, but I love the first one, to understand how the customer’s being paid. I worked for companies like Apple and Compaq and a couple of large software companies, and their model was different than the manufacturer’s model. When I worked at Apple, our people were paid on how they were growing the account. In the channel, they were getting paid on profit, because there’s costs. Even still, I had a meeting recently with a large company in what we’re calling the channel today, and the CEO of the company kept saying profit margin. I was like, “Okay. That’s right. That’s how they think in terms of that.”
Channel sales is an interesting profession. It’s critical in the tech world. It’s critical in a lot of B2B, but we’re talking today primarily civically about tech. What are some of the most important things people should do to be successful as channel sales professionals?
John Carey: The first one I think is common to all sales. I remember being told early on, product is king. You have to know the products you are positioning, and specifically how they either drive savings or enable new opportunities for your clients. You can’t have a good conversation with a partner if you don’t understand your product portfolio. The next thing I would say, specific to a channel sales professional, know how your partner generates profit. Are they a professional services focused company? That’s going to drive the solutions that they’re interested in and how they see their attach of dollars to the product or solution that you are positioning. Are they a managed service provider? Is it important to them that they own the managed compute and serve the outcome to the client?
We’ve seen the rise in managed service providers, I would say, over the last 10 years, where many customers are saying, “I want the outcome. I don’t want the management overhead.” We’ve seen it at the same time as we’ve seen many vendors move to a software as a service first delivery mechanism for their offerings. Then work out what is important for them. Is it annuity revenue? Is it profitability? Is it top-line revenue growth? One that’s often overlooked within the channel, cash flow. I hear it all the time, “Well, we don’t need to run the deal through the partner because the partner’s getting the services,” but these oftentimes are small or medium businesses, and the cash flow through their organization really helps them when they’re negotiating credit terms and credit from their lenders. you have to take a holistic view of that.
Then lastly, I would say understand your partner’s aspirations and understand how that aligns with your business’ objectives, because a partnership has to have alignment. If their objectives and yours don’t, then maybe the right move with that partnership is to go separate ways. Partnerships don’t last forever. They can last for many, many years, but at any point a partner or a vendor can make a decision that is critical for their business, that just doesn’t align with the objectives of the partner they’re engaged with. I think if we’re honest and upfront about that and understand it, when those things happen, we can have really good, structured conversations. How you end a relationship with a partner can be as important as how you start.
Fred Diamond: I’ve told stories before about when I was at Compaq and Apple. I was in the channel marketing organization, in addition to different places, but a couple times in my career, that’s what I had done. I remember once I made a decision, because I was asked to justify an executive’s decision. I did all the math and all the stuff to justify it. I was happy. I did my job. My boss was happy, it was a checkoff. We actually terminated a program, and I got a call from the sales leader who said, “You just put this guy out of business.” I was like, “Oh,” and it was less dramatic than that. He was being dramatic. But I remember I was sitting in a cube in Houston, Texas working for Compaq and did what my boss told me, the math worked from our perspective. I talked to the channel as well when it got back to me that the decision was really impacting them.
I said that to ask you a question, how much of your time and energy is spent communicating internally about how the channel is changing? Which leads to our next question, which is, what really is critical? Talk about how much internal communication, marketing strategy you do to the people above you, and then what are partners telling you is critical for you to be doing what you’re doing.
John Carey: I joined SAS two years ago, and it’s part of a transformation within the organization as we transform our sales organization. I would say that my first six months was all about internal communication of a strategy and a plan, getting input, testing things out. I was incredibly lucky that when I walked into the organization, the first thing that struck me was total alignment among the executive leadership team to the value of partners and partners as a critical element of the company’s future growth aspirations. The level of communication is more about making sure we’re aligned at that level and then start to work down through the organization.
By about my second year, I started to evangelize that same vision and mission to our partners and our broader sales organization. I’d say I’m probably spending 25% doing it internally. If I’m really honest, it’s not enough. When you’re driving change, there’s always more I can do. There’s always more you have to do. You can’t over communicate. I’m doing things like recording small snippets that can be communicated out. I just came back from a three-city Innovate on Tour event where I met with local partners, local customers in Paris, Milan, and London.
I remember someone telling me, I was at Citrix and we launched a new partner incentive program called Advisor Rewards. To your point, we put together enablement, there were recordings. At one point I looked at my team and I said, “Do you know the most effective communication vehicle we’ve got? It’s the bar at an event with a paper napkin and a pen, where I can sit with a partner and go, ‘Hey, if the deal comes in like this and you do this and you register this, this is how much you make.’”
That was possibly the most effective. You could see partners go, “I get it,” because it was personal to them. I remember us having a conversation about, “Can we maybe film that? Is there a way that we could animate it?” How do we do a thing that can encapsulate that selling? It’s person to person, that authentic engagement where someone can challenge you and you can say, “Hey, I’m not sure that I understood what you meant and I’m not sure you understand what I meant. Can we have a moment and clarify?” Then take that to be able to unpack an idea and then put it back together and say, “Has that changed anything?”
The great thing I got out of it, I learned more from those exchanges than anyone did from me, even when the objective was me communicating. I do it now. I went out to Paris, Milan, and London. I learned more from the field engagement, the customer engagement, and the partner engagement than the 15-minute presentation that I provided as part of the executive team.
Fred Diamond: One of the big topics that comes up on the Sales Game Changers Podcast right now, and the Institute for Excellence in Sales, where one of the programs that we’re most proud of is our Women in Sales Leadership Forums. One of the topics that comes up a lot is the whole hybrid work from home world. You just said one of the greatest things, the transformational thing was standing at a bar, writing whatever you wrote down on the paper napkin at the bar. Those things happen. We don’t do those as much anymore, for obvious reasons, the results of the pandemic, et cetera.
What are you doing to get back and what do you recommend for people on your team and for people listening here today to get back? You just said you went to three cities, London, Milan, and Paris physically. We all know those things. Some of the great examples of success that those of us who’ve been here and are listening to the podcast was, I’m thinking of these meetings that I’ve had now. They’re popping into my head. Talk about what people should be doing to get back to that space, or not.
John Carey: Look, it’s a conversation we’re all having. How do we reinvigorate the office environment to encourage people to come back? Those hallway conversations, those kitchen sink with a coffee, with a glass of water engagements that spark a thought, that triggers an idea that is a creative process. We’ve all worked really hard to try and do this in a virtual environment. I will say the new generation coming in, they are very effective at engaging virtually with each other, with clients. I’m learning from them. But my advice would be, I think we have to be intentional with in-person, and we have to demonstrate that the content we are delivering and the value we are creating is transparent so the customer is willing to meet us there.
The days of turning up with a box of donuts and some coffee are consigned to the past. Also, if that was evident, that was just a courtesy as we walked in the door to have meaningful conversations, make connections individually. Look, I think there’s a change that I’m perceiving where there’s a desire for more in-person engagement. But I think underpinning that, we’ve got to have a real reason to be there. If we don’t, we’ll lose that opportunity. If you’re going to turn up at a client’s, have something to say that is a value to the client. They are letting you into their space and that is not without risk. If you’re going to go to an event, have a plan for the event. I tell this to partners all the time, you have to be hosting a customer. Don’t come to the event without a customer. This event is for you to help your customer get to the outcome and meet the execs and take advantage of the fact we’ve managed to be in one place. Take advantage of that and make sure you’re getting the most out of it. I think to do that, you got to plan.
Fred Diamond: Like you just said in the very beginning of the conversation, what they’re hoping to achieve, it’s in line, hopefully, with yours, because the channel and you, the developer/manufacturer, or whatever, you’re trying to help the customer achieve their goals. Every customer we’re dealing with right now, John Carey, they have ambitious goals, most of them. The whole world has shifted, so everyone’s, not just my goal as a manufacturer, developer, or the channel partner, the customer, every single customer that we’re dealing with is trying to figure out where do they go.
I know you don’t have a crystal ball in front of you, but what are some of your insights into where the channel sales space might be going in the next five to seven years?
John Carey: I have a vested interest in this answer because I truly believe, there’s probably a wave every two to three years of it’s all going to go direct. There is no need for the channel anymore. The channel continues to demonstrate that what customers need now more than ever, are trusted advisors to help them navigate in our space, AI, generative AI, and the technology landscape. We know there’s a lot of hype out there. Frankly, there’s a lot of snake oil out there. Customers need someone who understands them intimately, understands their regional needs, understands their vertical or micro vertical needs. With the best one in the world, vendors will have areas that they focus on and areas that they’re suboptimized around.
What the partner does is it steps into that space, partners and partner sellers step into that space and fill that gap of intimacy with the client, intimacy with the problem, intimacy around the solution that gives the client confidence. I think the next five to seven years, we’re going to see huge disruption. We’re going to see a lot of winners and a lot of losers. But we’re going to see every time before a recreation of the channel for the next generation, continuing to be trusted advisors to the client and helping them navigate the landscape.
Fred Diamond: Like I told you, I was at Apple in channel theory. About 30 years ago, I remember sitting in a conversation with a senior VP who said, “The channel’s going away,” and the channel didn’t go away. Even Dell, who was the quintessential direct customer. We have a big award event every year at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, and we honored a guy named Jim Kelly who runs Dell’s public sector globally, and we had 30 partners in the room from Dell. 30 years ago, no one in the world would’ve predicted that.
John, how can channel professionals, again, people who work for you and your organization and some of your complimentary companies, how can they provide the better partner experiences? Now, again, we keep talking about the customer, but we still have to enlist the partner and we have to motivate them, et cetera, excite them, put programs into place that’s going to help make them successful. How can the channel professionals provide better partner experiences?
John Carey: I’m going to say, the human design is intentional. Listen first. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason. If you want to give a partner better experiences, listen more than you talk, be clear about expectations. It’s not about making the partner happy. It’s about being clear and consistent with your expectations so that partner can make an active choice about working with you. I’m a big fan, it’s old school. I actually use an electronic notebook now, instead of a paper notebook, or a Moleskine. Document, write it down. If you write something down, I certainly remember it, and it’s easy to go back to it, and be solutions focused. If something’s not working, say it. Offer ways to make it better. If it can’t get better, be honest about that and say, “Okay, maybe the right outcome of this is this isn’t a good partnership.” I think so long as we just listen, we’re clear about expectations, we are documenting our plans together and holding each other accountable with a solutions focus, I think that’s how you help partners navigate the landscape of vendors and decide who they want to work with.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank John Carey, he is the VP of global channels at SAS, for the great insights today. Congratulations on the success and all the great things that you’re doing, and for the great insights that you just provided to our listeners at the Sales Game Changers Podcast. John, thanks again for all the great insights you provided today. A lot of actionable things. Matter of fact, you said some things that when you first said, when I asked you for advice on how to work better with some of the professional advice you got, and you said, understand how they’re getting paid. I’m going to be honest with you, I got chills, because I’ve never heard that answer before on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’ve done close to 800 episodes, and that was brilliant. I want to applaud you for that, whoever gave you that advice, I know you mentioned who it was.
When you can think about what’s really motivating them, and we talk a lot about more sales motivates them, how much they’re getting paid. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who it is, if they’re in this world that we’re talking about, they might talk about providing value and all those things. At the end of the day, it’s how are they getting paid and that is what’s going to motivate them. I love that answer. It’s a great answer. Give us a final action step, something specific that listeners should do right now to take their partner sales or their sales career to the next level.
John Carey: I would say, do what this audience is doing right now. Stay abreast of the industry news. I would say find out what your executives, and more importantly, your customers are reading or listening to in order to better understand them. Sales for me, it’s always going to be, whether it’s virtual or physical, it’s a person-to-person activity. If we can be authentic and customer-focused, with that knowledge behind us so that we earn the value that we bring in order to have that engagement with the client, it’s a winning strategy.
Fred Diamond: Every customer that we’re dealing with, their main focus isn’t how they work with you. Their focus is how are they serving their customer. The best sales professionals that I’ve met, they think about that. They listen, they read. They don’t just come to the customer with simple things that they got from ChatGPT. There’s nothing wrong with getting some things from ChatGPT to spur you, but they’re coming to them with real evidence that they care, that they know what your customer’s thinking.
Once again, I want to thank John Carey with SAS for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo