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Today’s show featured an interview with Marc Monday, Vice President, Global Partnerships & Alliances at Deltek.
Find Marc on LinkedIn.
MARC’S TIP: “Embrace marketing. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that marketing is a separate discipline from what you do. Marketing is selling. Increasingly, the data shows 68% to 75%, even 80% of all customer buying decisions are done digitally online before you ever see them in your CRM. As a sales professional, it is incumbent on you to become an expert at marketing and understanding what that is. That bridge between sales and marketing is probably the single most important thing that will set you apart.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Today’s guest is Marc Monday. He’s from Deltek. If that name rings a bell with a lot of our listeners, we’ve had a bunch of Deltek people on the show in the past. During the pandemic we had Natasha Engan on the show. She did a great job. We run a Women in Sales program, a Global Women in Sales Leadership Forum at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. A number of Deltek Women in Sales leaders have gone through the program and have participated in the podcast and various things along the way.
Marc, why don’t you give us an introduction? I know you’re relatively new at Deltek. You’re heading up partnerships, and we do a lot of shows on the partner ecosystem and what’s happening. I’m excited to talk to you about your view of what’s going on in the partner network, what’s going on in partnerships in general, and I’m excited to hear more about you. Why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction, and tell us what brought you to Deltek?
Marc Monday: Fred, thank you so much for this invitation to appear on the show. I’m overwhelmed and honored. 700 episodes is pretty darn remarkable. I’m super excited to be here. My name is Marc Monday and I lead the global partners and alliances team here at Deltek. I’ve been here for about 90 days, and in those 90 days, it has been absolutely wonderful. If you don’t know about Deltek, Deltek’s mission is to deliver the most complete industry-specific solutions to maximize our customer’s performance at every stage of the partner lifecycle. Project-based businesses transform the world we live in, and Deltek is the global standard that innovates and delivers software and solutions to power them to achieve their purpose. Think of key specific verticals, A&E, government contracting, project-based businesses.
Fred Diamond: You’ve had a long history in partnerships. I’m based in Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. We have interviewed a lot of people in the govcon space. Everybody who’s in the govcon space knows about Deltek, because all of the government-approved accounting systems are based on Deltek technology.
Let’s talk about partnerships and Deltek. We’re doing today’s interview in the early fall of 2024, and you had just mentioned that you just finished your first quarter at Deltek. You’ve had a long history of success in the partner world. How critical are partnerships to Deltek? Deltek has grown over the years. You mentioned multiple types of industries, govcon, A&E, et cetera. What kind of partners are in your ecosystem?
Marc Monday: Partnering for me is my life. I’ve spent my whole career in this partnering profession. One of the things that I love about it is it changes all of the time and it anchors in value to the customer. I really like to think about partnering in three broad tranches. These are fairly common these days. Build partners, sell partners, and services and integration partners. The reason why I like to do that is this is the era of the ecosystem. I think something fundamentally has changed in the last 10, 15 years, which is in the past you could have a reseller partner, you’d list them in your Salesforce, that’d be the one partner that you do shared economics with, and that’s the end of the deal. You didn’t have to think about the resource utilization underneath, what servers are being used, or if you’re using a data center, or if you’re using a hyperscaler. You didn’t need to think about the applications that were maybe plugging into your product, leveraging services back and forth. You didn’t need to think about the way you might extend your product and a managed service. It was a simpler time.
But in an ecosystems’ world, you want tons of partners involved in a deal. The more you understand who’s involved in the deal, the more you can create value for the customer, the most important thing, the air we breathe. But importantly, for you as a publisher, like Deltek is, and also for the partners, because there’s lots of room to add value above and beyond the core product that we deliver, which is instrumental to the success of those customers, but importantly, understanding what the customer’s need is.
For me, I really like to think about it in those buckets. The build partners, are we building on top of a technology? Are we building on top of core on-premise server? Are we building on a hosted environment? Are we building in a cloud-native hyperscale environment? Who are the build partners that plug into our products? What products do we plug into the marketing and sell partners? Oh my gosh, the most important part of the value change.
The marketing and sell partners, they’re the ones that really bring us to the engagement. A lot of times our partners know the customer better than we do. They live next to them. They live in the same town. Maybe they’ve been selling to that customer for 20, 30 years. By the way, they also sell adjacent technologies. They’re selling other things. They’re selling their services, they’re selling adjacent technologies. Maybe they’re selling monitoring services. There’s a bunch of things that go on in selling.
Selling and marketing can also be co-marketing and co-selling, which is maybe they’re going to sell the deal and we’re going to do the services. Or maybe they’re going to sell the deal and they don’t want to take, if they’re let’s say a CPA firm, they don’t want to take the economic fee. They want to do it as part of their overall business and be within their compliance requirements. That sales and marketing co-sell button is incredibly important.
Then the most important thing when you’re dealing with a complex solution like an ERP, is the services partner. That implementation is key. We deliver a product that is by definition componetizable and very customizable. That’s the last mile where we want the customer to be incredibly successful, as bespoke as they can be, but also leveraging best practices.
Fred Diamond: You’re not going to believe this, but my MBA thesis was on channel theory and design. The reason I bring that up is I was working for Apple Computer, I got my MBA at the same time, and that was what I chose to focus on. Ecosystem wasn’t even thought of by anybody. I’ll tell some people my MBA was on that, and they’re like, “It hasn’t changed much.” I’m like, “It kind of has,” especially now with all these concepts about the ecosystem.
Let’s focus the rest of our conversation on the marketing and sell partners, because I know we have a lot of people in that world who are listening. Now that you’re on this particular show, I know a bunch of people will be listening to find out what Deltek is doing in the partner world. Because you do bring a critical technology into a lot of markets, and you’re absolutely right, sometimes the partner may have been selling it to the customer for decades. We’re doing this interview in 2024, maybe it was even multiple decades. What do the marketing and sell partners expect from vendors such as Deltek, and maybe even Deltek specifically, if you’re willing to share?
Marc Monday: I think my experience with partners through my entire career is they need to know the rules of the game and what that looks like. That is really for them, the partner to make an investment in the business, they want to know what the addressable market opportunity is, what the vendor or publisher’s objectives are to attack that market, what the segmentation is associated with going after that market, what the core value prop is to the customer. But then importantly, we have to build a two-partner value prop. What’s in it for you? How do you make money? Why are we better than the others? What’s the time horizon for making that money? The through partner marketing, which is, here’s enough about our product that you can wrap within your services offering, or some of the other adjacent technologies that you sell for your through partner value prop.
Then I think once that’s clear of what the engagement model looks like, I’ll call it the route to market strategy, then partners will make a decision, is this a good investment of my time? We have to earn that right with the partner every single day because there are a million other vendors coming at them saying, “Sell my product.” If we have a good addressable opportunity, a good two-partner message, a good through customer from partner message, and we’re consistent in the engagement model, that’s what I think partners are looking for.
Fred Diamond: Are most of the relationships that you’re involved with and leading right now, are they long-term, they’ve been around for a while? How much is brand new? I’m not going to say someone just discovered Deltek, but maybe someone you worked with at a previous place now knows that you’re at Deltek and they want to pursue it. What is the balance? Is it 80/20? Is it 50/50?
Marc Monday: The wonderful thing in the ERP space in general is that it’s a very complicated business to get into, but it’s also a very sticky business. In general, many of the partners that are delivering value, particularly around sales, marketing, and services today, have been partners for a long time. But we do have lots of opportunities to drive new engagements. Now, most partners don’t wake up and say, “Hey, I’m going to go build a new ERP practice tomorrow.” That’s pretty uncommon. But there are some specific areas where they may be going into a new vertical, the verticals that we live and breathe in, that would be really a unique opportunity. They may be looking at some of our products.
We acquired a company called Replicon which really focuses on time, time tracking. That is ERP agnostic. That might be an interesting entry for some new partners to come in. But in general, the balance is a lot of traditional legacy partners that we’ve been with for a long time that really know our products cold, and then increasingly new partners. Then I would say from a geo expansion perspective, as we’re entering new markets, that typically is maybe a little bit less expertise in those geos, and then we’re getting there based upon partners that really deliver to those core verticals that we live in.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about it from your perspective, from the vendor looking outwards. For the partners who are listening, the companies that are in the channel, what does Deltek expect? What do vendors expect from their partners these days?
Marc Monday: If I go back through the build, sell, integrate, or services, I think that’s a good way to look at it. I think increasingly, and I’ll say sales and marketing, because this is foreshadowing something at the very end of this conversation that I’ll talk about with respect to marketing. I think that we hope that the partners give us reach and scale that we can’t do on our own. I have a wonderful story that I tell direct sellers all the time, and this came to me from a direct seller.
“The reason why direct sellers really love ecosystem strategies is there are 24 hours in a day,” and this guy said to me, “And I have to sleep 10 hours. I can actually get a partner to help me go sell when I’m sleeping.” The way he positioned it to me is that also means that I’m like a little sales manager or sales VP of my patch. If I think about it, if I have the right amount of partners, I can do a 24-hour sales day. If I really think about it, I might have a week’s worth of sales every single day. That’s a unique way to think about how you extend yourself from a selling perspective.
Fred Diamond: Where are we right now from a perspective of the company manages all the partner relationships, like your organization? Are enterprise sales professionals now empowered to go out and discover and create their own partnerships? There’s always been a degree of that, especially as you go deeper into an account that has maybe existing relationships that the company might not have had before. But is that something that’s been evolving in the industry as well?
Marc Monday: For sure. If there’s one thing I would encourage sellers to do is really in the notes in Salesforce or whatever tool you’re using to track your deal, find out everyone that’s in the deal, find out every entity that’s in the deal. It may not feel important to you, and it may feel like it’s elongating your sales cycle, but I assure you, if you’re able to tag and track every entity that’s influencing that deal, and we start to see trend data like, “In deals that look and act like this, that partner always comes through.” Or, “Deals that look and act like this, there’s a glide path with procurement, because they’ve already pre-negotiated something.” Or, “Deals that look and act like this, they have a very specific need for this third-party application.”
Tagging and tracking that information within your CRM, whatever that may be, and elevating it, that gives the channel chief, whoever that is, the ability to then go say, “I should actually have a deeper partnership with that entity.” I don’t know what the economics are. We’ll go through a value exchange and I can talk a little bit more about what value exchange means to me. But that for me, if you’re a seller, take a moment and really understand who’s in your deal. It speaks to all the sales methodologies we learned in the past, depending upon when you started in sales. The idea is you want to know where all the potential aces are and then where all the potential pitfalls are. Going through that exercise, particularly when you’re in a bigger enterprise deal of understanding who all is involved in the deal, is really, really important.
Fred Diamond: We’re talking about data and understanding how to make these decisions. Every show we do, AI comes in at some point. Where is AI playing a role right now? Then how are you using AI to improve the overall delivery of what you’re doing?
Marc Monday: I think for partners and for partner sellers and partner marketers, the idea of AI can make your job a lot simpler. I’ll use a very simple example. Let’s say you’re a partner account manager, you’ve got a big patch, you’ve got 20, 30 partners, and the whole day you’re spending basically chasing questions. Where’s my rebate? Where’s my reporting? How do I go find this piece of content? What’s the next drop of this particular product? Whatever those issues may be. It becomes whack-a-mole for a partner account manager or a channel account manager. But imagine if we have smart, intelligent sales and marketing tools and partner portals that are supported by real people, that can answer some of those questions for the partner on their own, that sort of self-service type solution. That’s a really great way to do it.
Another area where I’ve seen in other companies where AI is really adding value is maybe you build a tool where you’re listening to a specific set of customers. You have an account-based marketing strategy, and you’re looking across social media, across other listening mechanisms, to say, “That customer is making consideration of this type of product.” You can’t have your SDRs on every call all the time, all day, every day. But the idea would be, could you get some telemetry from scraping the web and also doing some listening, and also doing some social listening? That type of resourcing will really change the sales profession in a meaningful way. So much so that you may get to a point, hopefully in the future, where the AI is basically sending you a message that says, “That customer that’s on your hit list, they’re ready to be called about a demo today.” That will be wonderful.
Fred Diamond: As I’m listening to you talk here, and I reviewed your background, you’ve had a great career working with some great companies that have defined what the ecosystem is. Would you recommend to someone maybe who’s entering the sales world, maybe out of college or first job, in their early to mid-20s, would you or would you not recommend that they go into the partner channel world for their career?
Marc Monday: One hundred percent, for sure. Every job is unique to different personality types. The partnering profession, and it really is a profession, I think sometimes people who are in it, they think they’re alone because sometimes they’re having to work on product marketing, and sometimes they’re having to work on brand marketing. Sometimes they’re having to work on operations, and sometimes they’re dealing with Rev Rec. Sometimes they’re chasing deals down the funnel and sometimes they’re having to man a booth at an event.
I think sometimes, if you’re a partner account manager or a channel account manager, it feels very lonely, because you’re like, “Wow, this is a unique thing that’s different than what other people in my company do.” But in this partnering profession, holy smokes, the opportunities are limitless. What I really love about it is it’s always about the customer first. It’s always about delivering real meaningful value to that customer through an entity that they trust. It’s always changing because the expectations are always changing.
If you have a growth mindset, if you like a varied and constantly-changing career, and you can look a little bit further out than one quarter, and there’s an important reason for that, this is a wonderful profession to you. If you are a seller who likes to find a deal, do it mostly on your own, most people can’t do it on their own entirely today, and you want to book it and you don’t need your name on it, that probably might not be the best profession. The reason why I say that is, a lot of the work that I will do today, I will see in my pipeline six months from now, and I’ll see in my close one nine months from now. That requires an understanding of all of the KPIs to get there.
If you are a very goal-oriented person that like, “I want to see the scores on the board at the end of the quarter,” this can sometimes be a challenging profession for those sorts of people. But again, I always say, give it a try. Even for those direct sellers who want to put scores on the board, go put the channel to work for you, and the channel will happily do it, as long as the rules of the game are important.
I said a thing a minute ago about value exchange. Value exchange is really important because you may be thinking, and I’ve heard this a lot, people know the channel as they met it. You and I are about the same age. When I say channel, most people of our vintage will say, “That’s a reseller business. That’s upfront margin on a perpetual license, and I know exactly what that looks like.”
When I answered your question at the beginning about what types of partners, I was very coy. I didn’t say reseller, I didn’t say SI, I didn’t say ISV, and that was quite intentional. Because what we want to really talk about is, if I use those words, you’re going to go back to the way you met this industry. But really what we should do is we should look at the life cycle of the deal of a customer, and then we should think about all the different decision points that a customer has along their awareness, enablement, consideration, sales and marketing, purchase, renew, add-ons. There’s a value exchange at every step along the way. You might have different partnering models at differing points of that value exchange over the lifecycle of the customer.
Fred Diamond: You’re absolutely right. We come in with some preconceived notions of what a certain type of partner looks like and how they operate, and what their metrics are, and what their financials are. I remember once when I was at Apple, I was part of the team that was running the state and local marketplace. I remember I met with one of our partners, the guy who was in charge of the contracts for Arizona. I remember very clearly, he said to me, “I know every metric along the way.” That stuck with me. That was in the early ‘90s. He knew what his model was, he knew how much time and things, again, it was hardware, which is a little bit of a different marketplace.
I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m just curious based on some of the things we talked about, where do you think we’re going over the next two years? I can’t ask you, “Marc, where are we going to be in two years?” But where is the industry going? Where’s the profession going? Where do we expect to be? It’s funny, as I was looking at your LinkedIn bio before this, I knew where you were along the way and I knew all those places and what the partnership world looked like. You’ve done a great job making them more lucid for us today. Where are we going from a vendor and from a partner perspective?
Marc Monday: I think the future for the ecosystem is we’re just getting started. I think that the changes that have gone through the industry in terms of going from on-premises, perpetual licensing, upfront costs, all of those changes still replicate. A lot of customers are still not really all in in the cloud. This change is still happening real time when you’re out in the patches, and you recognize that in our technology world, we talk about this stuff all the time, we assume it’s over. But the reality is, for real customers, they’re making these decisions every day.
I think one is the pace of change will continue to accelerate. Two, customer’s expectations will continue to increase. Three, the level of complexity gets higher and higher and higher. Four, however, it is our job as partnering professionals or ecosystem professionals or sellers is it needs to look simple. It is the quintessential duck on the water. It needs to look smooth as glass or as close as you can get for the customer.
Underneath, there is a ton of complexity. My word of caution to everyone is try not to externalize the complexity to your customer. Don’t put them in the middle. Make it easy for them. Sell the way they want to buy, with entities that they trust today, and really make it as simple as you can for them. But the level of complexity increases.
Now, you mentioned earlier, the good news is the tools only get better. The sales tools that we have today are a million times better than the sales tools we had 20, 30 years ago. The telemetry that we can get across a number of different marketing and sales resources is better than it’s ever been. I think the future is super, super bright. I think the future holds days where generally, and I think this is true already, no deal is done soup to nuts by a publisher or a single partner. It is an ecosystems closure to deliver value for customers.
Fred Diamond: A couple things. One is, it is all about the end customer. What do they need and how do they need it? You’re absolutely right. There’s so much turmoil, for lack of a better word, in all of our segments, because of what’s happened over the last couple years, not just to the industry, but to the world. Companies are trying to redefine how they go about their business. It used to be about, “Okay, I’m selling to a customer. I need to know what they’re doing.” Well, there’s still more of you need to know what they’re doing because they’re trying to figure out what their customer’s doing, and their customer’s trying to figure out what their customer’s doing. Not just in tech, but in most things that we do.
Marc, you’ve given us a lot of great things to think about. Congratulations again on your new role. Best of luck. Give us a final action step.
Marc Monday: I’m going to give you two. Item one is a little thought experiment for yourself, which is go spend 20 minutes with your phone. Whatever it is you do with your phone, imagine what you did 25 years ago before you had that phone. That’s what your customers are experiencing. If we’re selling to them the way you experienced your phone 25 years ago, then we’ve missed the mark. We do all of our research online. We look into things, we look at people’s LinkedIn profiles before we meet, we learn about them on the web. We watch some videos, we go to YouTube, we listen to what other people say. The reality is, that’s table stakes. You need to be able to be prepared.
That dovetails to my second action, which is really embracing marketing. If there’s one thing I would ask sales professionals and ecosystems professionals to do is don’t fall into the trap of thinking that marketing is a separate discipline from what you do. Marketing is selling. Increasingly, the data shows 68% to 75%, even 80% of all customer buying decisions are done digitally online before you ever see them in your CRM. As a sales professional, it is incumbent on you to become an expert at marketing and understanding what that is.
Now, I don’t mean go do the marketing person’s job, you should be partnering with them, but you should be savvy enough to know what that means, and clear enough to know that that’s going to help drive your pipeline. That bridge between sales and marketing is probably the single most important thing that will set you apart when you’re thinking about driving towards your quota, getting to club, and buying that fancy car that you want. That is the thing that will set you apart.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Marc Monday for being on today’s show, for giving us a lot of the great insights. My name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo