On-demand webinar: Future of Partner Marketing 2025

Partner marketing isn’t just evolving, it’s accelerating. With buying committees now stretching to 20+ decision-makers, AI reshaping how we work, and digital-first journeys dominating the sales cycle, vendors face a stark choice: adapt or fall behind.

In this Future of Partner Marketing webinar, Jay McBain (Canalys), Andrew Kisslo (SAP), and Tom Perry (The Sherpa Group) unpacked the structural shifts driving partner marketing into uncharted territory. From navigating the 28 critical moments in the buyer journey to balancing automation with human trust, the session explores what really needs to change for channel programs to scale.

A big thank you to our speakers for sharing their insights:

• Andrew Kisslo - SVP, Global Partner Marketing at SAP
• Jay McBain - Chief Analyst at Canalys
  
• Tom Perry - CEO at The Sherpa Group

On-demand webinar:

Webinar transcript: 

[00:00:00] Tom Perry:

Right. Hello everybody.

Good afternoon, good morning, wherever you may be joining us from, around the world.

We've had a fantastic response to this session and, I'm absolutely delighted to be joining you from just north of London, in our fourth, heat wave of the year in the UK.

I'm delighted you could join us for what is the 10th in our series of future of webinars, that have been supported over five years by Jay McBain.

And I'll introduce Jay and Andrew, my fellow panelists, shortly. But I'm very absolutely honored that they have been able to, support our event.

They're perfect panelists to discuss the future of partner marketing.

We have four main topics to cover today in the pre-event material. But we do welcome questions in the chat. We have had some sent to us already, so if you did that, thank you very much. We will get to those at various points during our time together today. You will get a recording and a summary.

You can have the full transcript of this if you'd like. So no need for for rapid notetaking, but I don't think there is anyone in the world today taking physical notes.

So welcome and so no further ado. Let me introduce, Jay McBain, who is Chief Analyst for Channels, partners and Ecosystems at Catalyst.

And Andrew Kisslo, who is SVP of Global Marketing at SAP.

Jay is going to be our host today, and I'm gonna hand over to him now. Welcome Jay. Welcome Andrew.

[00:01:44] Jay McBain:

Thank you so much. I'm an hour north of Miami and not only do we have a heat wave vut we have a first named hurricane of the season, kind of barreling across the Atlantic, but I think it's gonna turn north just in time.

How's the weather up where you are Andrew?

[00:02:01] Andrew Kisslo:

It is also a heat wave, pushing it towards Tom as I'm in Seattle.

It's good to join you all!

[00:02:06] Jay McBain:

Good. So I'm seeing everybody in the chat window as well. We've got some good coverage around the US and around the world. So I'm excited to talk about this.

This is a really interesting time to talk about this inflection point in channel marketing. So excited we get to talk with you, Andrew and Tom, about this. You know, obviously everything is changing at once. But for those of you — and I recognize many in the chat window going back over the years — when, you know, maybe 30-something odd years ago, we were talking about co-branded brochures.

We stepped up the game in through-channel marketing with email campaigns and social and search and syndicated content. And over the last five to ten years, we started combining our partners with their account-based marketing, ABM strategies, getting closer to the moments that matter within that partner.

And obviously things are changing in that each of these moments now involves a different buyer. The majority buyer for all of us in the tech industry — 51 percent of the $5.3 trillion — is now led by millennials born after 1982. Digital-first, digital-only buyers. In fact, 75 percent in a recent survey said they don't actually want to talk to a human at any part of that cycle.

We are facing off to a platform economy. We have different economics of partnering going on. We’ll also be talking today about AI, about scale, about trust and alignment inside of that. So lots to cover. But I want to kind of kick things off with the customer in the middle.

You know, Andrew, I'd love to kind of get your take. You see it obviously from all angles. What changes have you seen from the customer? And then, as partners are contributing — or in most of those moments — what are you seeing from a partner element?

[00:04:15] Andrew Kisslo:

Yeah, glad to be here.

It’s such a great topic. One of the things we can see is that the buyer is changing. And so the dynamics of a customer are changing in a couple of ways. You just chatted about one — a lot more digital savvy. We’ve moved from a world of trying to collect emails toward enabling the journey, right?

So enabling that customer in a different way on your front end is paramount.

The second thing is that buying committees are now larger. Especially in the enterprise space, as you go higher. Selling SAP used to be very relationship-focused, and now we see, on average, buying committees of 12 to 20 people.

Inside those buying committees are different generations. You still have Baby Boomers, you still have Gen X, but you also have Millennials and Gen Z, who are really looking for authenticity and digital.

So this mix of the buyer has changed as well.

What we’re seeing is a really different dynamic across the journey of how you try to engage with a customer — partners along the ride. We’re also moving from a world where you had really direct, first partner-assisted selling motions.

Now flipping that — how do you have a partner-sold model, where the partners are leading and doing sourcing, selling, supporting, and renewing, all through digital signals?

It’s a really big shift for a lot of ecosystems to make that pivot.

[00:05:48] Jay McBain:

Yeah. And you said “renewing,” and the big change with subscription, consumption, and now micro-consumption models is this: in the old world, there would be a handoff — an MQL to SQL, marketing-to-sales handoff.

Nowadays, winning a customer is really just winning the first 30 days with that customer. There’s an expectation that we’re going to renew almost all of our customers. But there’s also an expectation — from boards and investors — that we’re going to renew at 108 percent. Meaning we’re upselling, cross-selling, enriching every one of those periods.

So the partners — and today, more than seven partners often contribute through that journey — the journey never ends. Marketing doesn’t have a point in time. It has a recurring model that feeds sales, feeds customer success, feeds the product, and feeds all the parts.

So Tom, I'd love to get your perspective. You're working with leading brands around the world on these challenges. What are you seeing at, kind of midway through 2025?

[00:06:55] Tom Perry:

Yeah, tha thanks Jay. I think we, we, we work at the, the, the interface, you know, a lot of concierge work with partners on behalf of, of large vendors.

And, and we've, we've seen this year we, we we're playing catch up. We, the, the, the, the tactics as you say, that were appropriate a year ago in partner marketing, and thus the support models that our, you know, our vendor clients, um, uh, put in place. Are are being surrounded by this, this incredible market of the 28 moments, the 75% of the dirt journey done digitally, marketplaces, co-selling, whatever these things are.

And, and, and our job as, as, as an agency is around trying to. Implement more modern ways of getting to the 28 or a proportion of the 28 moments on behalf of the partner. Um, you know, Andrew, Andrew, you know, how many, how many moments of those 28 do we expect Andrew and his teams to get to? How many do? How many do?

How many do you know of Great, great timing. Thank you. How many can I get partner to when I'm working on those campaigns? I think a bit bit strong, but this environment is so fast paced that we are, we're having to work alongside partners in, in those models, you know, see what attribution we can bring to things.

See the tactics as well. The tactics are changing and. And so I think, you know, as, as we need to be more complex, uh, in partner marketing as we need to have more touch points, we're looking at the entire system. As you said, it's not email collection and MQL to SQL handoff anymore. I can't. On behalf of a partner, you know, send some digital out and pick up the phone and hey, gimme an opportunity that that world has gone.

Whilst we surround things, you know, and, and I think we're gonna touch on buying groups later. I, I would just, you counsel that it's been a year of incredible change so far. And you know, we're only on the 13th of August, so goodness knows where we'll be by Christmas.

[00:09:00] Jay McBain:

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things since the last time we talked, um, you know, canals was acquired by Informa, a great UK company, fortune 100 style company, but runs, you know, has 220 magazines that customers read has hundreds of events that customers go to. Last week was Black Hat, one of the biggest cybersecurity events that's run by our company, but I, I, I wanted to bring this up 'cause it's real data and it's SAP focused, so I thought it would be a perfect place to kind of surface sits.

And, and we always talk about the 28 moments, and I showed the previous slide with the footprints and all the things that a customer might bump into in those 28 moments. Well, let's start, show a real life example of a big pharmaceutical company buying millions of dollars of transformation and, and actually look what it means.

You can start to see partners interweave inside the marketing campaigns and things like webinars and podcasts and editorial and other things, and you can see them bump against, you know, hyperscalers and you, you start to see this buying committee that Andrew mentioned that, you know, may have 12 to 20 people.

They're out there getting very smart and in a lot of cases they're doing this without, you know, this might be before the sales person at SAP ever sees the deal. 70% of the decisions are made in many cases now before the salesperson actually collects the deals. So I start to get obsessed over what's in light blue here as the customer's going along.

What does that consulting engagement, for example, with NTT, there was three separate paid engagements with NTT in the mid journey, like step 14. You have Yash in here from an ERP perspective, software one, which is the biggest reseller of software in the world. Later on, you know, towards the end of the journey you can see some ISVs come in and migration and other types of things.

But you can see SAP all over this. But this is the new reality is, you know, when you think about this is how do I make sure each of these moments, you know, obviously delight the customer, but also delight them in a way that moves them to the right. And obviously, um, you know, builds, uh, a comprehensive, um, and, um, you know, win-win scenario here for SAP.

So Andrew, I'd love for you to kind of riff on this a little bit, and I'm sure you have views that are much more detailed than this, but, you know, this is kind of the future of channel marketing we're staring at right here. And if you don't think that partners play an incredibly large role in, you know, pretty much every deal that, you know, SAP's working on, you start to see these types of maps.

[00:11:39] Andrew Kisslo:

Yeah. No, I love, I love this slide. In fact, uh, I'm wondering if you have access to our data, because this looks a lot like what we look at. Um, and I think there, there's two things behind this, especially when you think about the light blue for partner marketers. Um, this is where we live and thrive, right?

And this is why partner marketing, I think, is one of the most fascinating yet hardest things to do in marketing because you need that many different partners to effectively be on the same page with you about positioning your product and pricing. Yet at the same time, they have to stand out and differentiate themselves.

And so when you're enabling a channel, you need to have consistency, but enough room for partners to differentiate. Pick me. Pick me. I've got something to bring. In a different value prop to the customer. Um, behind this is obviously a lot of tooling. So not only are you talking about campaigns that you're giving to partners, but how are they doing it in a, in a friction-free way where they can come and get the things that they need.

And then how do we as the primary vendor, track and trace all of this? Um, because the more digital touch points you have, you get deep into sales orchestration. You know, you don't want to overload the customer. You don't want nine teams calling on the customer at different times. The worst thing is meeting in the elevator and saying, why are you here?

I'm here to talk to the customer. Me too. Um, but you wanna avoid that. And so the pressure it puts on. Backend operations and orchestration is not, it's not trivial. Um, 'cause you need this to happen at scale, but you also want to be customer minded, uh, to not overwhelm 'em. So, uh, we see this all, all the time of multiple touch points, um, happening everywhere throughout the partner as well as the customer.

[00:13:21] Jay McBain:

yeah. That's fantastic. We had a, we had a question that came up in the chat window, kind of a follow on end to that was. You know, if you have, you know, 12 to 20 as you said in the buying, uh, buying group today, you know, how do you, uh, go and prioritize or identify, you know, I'm sure they're not all 20 of them are at the same level.

Yeah. And obviously there's finance and it, and cyber security and, you know, all kinds of things. But, but how do you, you know, is, is it human based or is there a level of automation or AI that allows you to kind of trigger these moments and make sure that. You know, key individuals on that committee are being influenced in the right way.

[00:13:58] Andrew Kisslo:

Yeah. You, um, it's all of those things, right? Say a buying committee is 15 people and, and as someone is asking, you'll have different, uh, personas and actually levels in there, right? You might have someone who might be an an IT admin or a procurement specialist.

Who's very different than, uh, the CIO and we see all of those things. And so what we, what we can track is, uh, for decision makers and the persona around that. We see those folks usually come in, in, in physical face-to-face events. Um, those are for us, a very large Sapphire, COO round tables. They're not coming and downloading white papers, uh, but someone on their team might be.

And so we begin to break out, um, uh, personas based on, uh, as much as we know about them, what we can see is that for folks that are, um, not the buyer, but they're in the buying committee, they're not the decision maker. That's where we see the much more digital footprint. Um, and we can see, building through data, uh, beginning to score them and understand the account level, um, what is the activity inside an account, um, which is a really big shift for a lot of marketing teams too.

When you think about, you're no longer trying to drive an opportunity, you're actually trying to enrich engagement inside an account. Um, and so how do you begin to measure engagement? At a certain account and begin to feed your sales teams or your partners to say, lots of people are showing up here. We don't have all their names, but it's a, it's a good time to start engaging with the customer.

Between chat downloads, all types of signal we collect. So

[00:15:39] Jay McBain:

Yeah, that's, uh, that's great advice. Um, so Tom, a couple questions came up quickly, kind of in the chat window. You know, one was on, you know, the poor representation on partner websites. That connected this. And then the other one was, you know, on this cycle, this 28 moments, you know, seems to be a little bit random.

Is there a. You know, consideration is there, is there part of the cycle here, which awareness, knowledge, preference, commit by kind of one of those standard cycles? Do they, do they align to those moments? What are you seeing out in the market?

[00:16:08] Tom Perry:

I don't believe they do in, in most of these kind of involved sales, um, at, at the level you've, you've shared on the slide.

And, and I think what, what we're seeing is, is, you know, we know it's not, not linear. But we, we know, we know attribution is, is, is tricky, but if the, the challenge we're wrestling with actually is, and, and Andrew mentioned it is, is, is how, how can a partner actually get somewhere near the number of people in the buying group?

Okay. And, and you know, if that's between 12 and 25, I come back to the website point that, that that was asked if any 20% of, of a group of partners have got the right material on their website. They certainly haven't got the right infrastructure and backbone to identify buying groups. Right. That's, that's just that, that seems, that seems kind of linked to me, but I think.

What, what we are beginning to see and we, we, we are testing some a platform at the moment that, that we hope to bring to market is around being able to identify ident buyer personas within a buying group and be able to serve the material. Now, I think, uh, and content, but I think the point there is, uh, is that in any buying group, you've now got different generations of, of people to target and they consume information very differently.

The 25-year-old HubSpot inbound content marketing model is one way. The G two review is another. The, the peer group community that the SAP Sherpa are nowhere near, right. Is are another area. So I think we're having to deal with something that's nonlinear. It's. It's very, it's quite hard to track, but I think, I think the technology is gonna catch up in order to do more around buying groups.

And I think what we're being asked to do is, right, how can you implement programs, pick off, you know, six to 10 partners and run a buying group set of campaigns with them? And what information and data would that return to us, um, in terms of who we can get to in that more traditional model?

And then what do we need to do outside of that? Different platforms, but the 20, the 20% stat that came into questions was, uh, a raised eyebrow moment for me because is that, is that an opportunity for someone like Sher to go out and build partner website? Get into that, but, um, because we kind of demand driven, but I think it's it that says to me that we are still dealing with wildly varying different levels of sophistication in partner marketing technology.

[00:18:37] Jay McBain:

Yeah, absolutely. And Andrew's gonna spend this weekend going through all tens of thousands of partners websites just to make sure they're all up to, uh, all up to speed. But let's, I, I mean, we kind of pivoted into automation and technology. Let's kind of stay in that lane for a while. Um, I know Tom, with, with Edison, you've learned so much around AI building, obviously the models and the capabilities.

Andrew, take it to you first though, in terms of how have you used kind of in the last, you know, couple of years. Um, with generative AI and now agentic ai, how are you testing, how are you, um, almost thinking about AV testing, but how are you, um, thinking about this kind of broadly and, and there, are there specific initiatives underway that, um, you know, shown some promise?

[00:19:24] Andrew Kisslo:

Yeah, so, um, I, as we've shift from. I'll say old, old AI ML models, which still feels, uh, cutting edge. But now that we're into, you know, generative AI and, and AgTech, one of the things that we're starting to, to play with is. How much on the front end, um, can you, uh, start shifting agen AI in chatbots? Uh, right.

That was sort of the old chatbot of fill out a form and it really felt like interrogation as a service. Like ask a question, get a response. Um, because it's much more natural language based. Now, one of the things that we're kicking off is, uh, for our partners is how can they come in and interact? With AI in a way to say, um, I need to drive demand gen.

I have this much development funds. I'm trying to do this. Uh, I'm in retail in the Nordics, I'm trying to sell to customers, and so how do I actually start to narrow down for them? Here's the play you should be running, or here's the type of asset or even a vendor in your area that might be able to create an infographic, right?

Really trying to bring things to the, to the partners in that concierge mindset that Tom and team does do so really well is how do you lean on AI to, to. Provide more self service, uh, for those types of things. So that's one of the things that we're experimenting with now. I'm really excited to, to watch where it's gonna go.

[00:20:39] Jay McBain:

So yeah, it's interesting. There's a question that just came in is, you know, in that account based manage, uh, marketing approach, you know, when you sit down in front of a big pharmaceutical company, there's probably, you know, 10 SAP badged people that sit in cubicles at that headquarters of the customer.

So there's a lot of human approach to. You know, figuring out who the 20 committee members are, you know, how to surround them with what they need to move through the journey, uh, but generally in the market. The answer that, that we've seen, and I know Tom, you and I have talked a lot about this is a surround strategy.

I mean, there are, you know, obviously a lot of permutations and combinations that go along with how people consume information. Now, there's 12% of us who love podcasts. You know, 88% would probably rather in a primary way, get information in a different way. 35% of us love to go to an event and kind of have hallway chats and hotel lobby bar conversations and things.

But just understanding the psychology, you know, multiplied by the amount of customers that sit in your tam by the amount of, you know, members in the buying committee and the seven partners that surround them. I mean, you're into the trillions of permutations at this point, so now you roll back to. You know, where are the things that influence 'em over my shoulder?

There's a 15 spheres of influence and you know, how do I delight those 12% of, you know, the Joe Rogan folks that love podcasts and how do I delight the people that wanna go to one of the 352 events that run in our industry? And then I look around to all the other things, peer groups and associations and media and everything else.

And you know, there's gotta be a pretty broad based channel marketing strategy. You know, to make sure that not only are we covering people at a large pharmaceutical company, but we're covering an SMB, you know, customer that's going through their own journey. And they might be the only person in their own buying committee, and they only have one partner, a single throat to choke that's going on with them.

So, uh, it, it's a much broader strategy and AI can help here. So Tom, what, what are your feelings on that?

[00:22:38] Tom Perry:

I think we, we, we started the Edison journey with the platform of assessing huge amounts of data and use, using AI to do it, you know, two or three years ago. And, and, and it, and it got us into being able to tell a story to a vendor about which partners to invest in and which partners to support with, with, with, with which types of activity.

And that was a starting point. If, if we, if we bring that forward into the partner marketing work. We're now able to, um, look at huge amounts of data to measure partner marketing, alignment, skill, and resourcing. So again, we've taken that a bit deeper. And, and that's, that's where we've got to, I mean, yeah, we're doing generative for content production.

I mean, who isn't Right. You know, um, those, that, that, that, that ship has sailed. I think where we're getting to is that we're working. In setting up campaigns or even programs between vendors and, and partners of trying to demarcate between, you know, who can do what and what resources bring. So there is a technical audit or, or, or an automation audit to see, you know, what Andrew and his teams can do versus what we can do out in the field.

And that's not an exact science by, by any stretch of. Imagination and, and, you know, throw in the complexity of the marketplace and, and where do those 28 moments exist in the marketplace? And, and suddenly your trillions of are very hard to deal with. And I think you have to make a start, and I think attribution models and technology much better than it was.

But t's early days for us on that. It's, it's tough to do.

[00:24:11] Jay McBain:

Yeah, it's great. And there's just a question on marketplaces as well, so I'm glad you brought that up. But, um, in that slide that I showed, uh, two of the bounces, uh, in those 28 moments were off of AWS so a big partner of SAP and obviously helped the customer move along the journey.

That was before the consulting engagements and design and architecture work with the partners. It also happened after that. So it's showing that these marketplaces are not just at the point of sale. It's not where the enterprise credits and. And things sit and, and where it is transacted like you would think in the old reseller distribution game, they're gonna play a larger and larger role in the navigation of this, uh, seven layer stack that the customer probably ended up with, uh, at, at the end of that, um.

At the end of that journey. So Andrew, I'd love to kind of get your take on AWS and, and Microsoft and Google and Alibaba and Oracle and the other, you know, kind of hyperscalers and, you know, how is that entering into your channel marketing chat.

[00:25:12] Andrew Kisslo:

Yeah, the, they're, they're critical. Um, I think, you know, one of the things that's to go back in the, in the way back machine of, you know, the ERP and mission critical workloads are, are sort of the last frontier to go to the cloud for a variety of different reasons.

And so the dependency that we have on hyperscalers broadly, um, is tremendous. Um, while we have our own data centers to run quarter end close at Chevron, you need a lot of compute. Um, and so you end up using hyperscalers, um. And we, we lean on those relationships for everything to not only run SAP, but all the workloads that sit around it.

And this is where we get into, uh, the partner of my partner is my partner, where many times the ISVs that are built on, uh, a hyperscaler and might be in one of those marketplaces are necessary to connect into SA. Right where you might have a Splunk or an I service or DocuSign available in a marketplace and it needs to connect into SAP, which is running on AWS.

Our dependency for everything from, uh, running SAP to joint selling to co-innovation, which is the next frontier, how do you build that code innovation layer with an AWS with the Azure team, um, on AI all the way through? Is incredible. It's just paramount, uh, because not only do they extend your reach, they actually extend your innovation cycles and make 'em faster.

Which is, which is a real dependency that we have now.

[00:26:37] Jay McBain:

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, again, we focused the first era of marketplaces. We kind of thought about the point of transaction. Uh, we thought of about the point of renewal. Uh, but we're learning that, you know, the first 28 moments have, you know, some deeper connections to marketplaces.

So five years ago when, um, I was actually a forester, I wrote a report that had Salesforce's app exchange as the number one marketplace in the world. It was better than AWS's at the time and Microsoft and Google's and others around the industry. And it was interesting because only a couple of years later, Salesforce goes and partners up with AWS It was October of 2023 and in 18 months, you know, they drove $2 billion through, um, AWS's marketplace.

So it wasn't about the feature function of, you know, each marketplace and breaking them down. It was about this ecosystem like you just mentioned, Andrew, that you know, the seven layer stack above Salesforce, DocuSign, and the snowflakes and all the different layers, cybersecurity, CrowdStrike, and all the, the layers above it, you know, wrap around a different ecosystem and you gotta participate in the places where your customers are, where their outcomes are, and the layers of the stack that they're engaging in.

And this, you know, creates, uh, another change. And that this is kind of the, uh, point of the conversation around all these changes in selling marketing that, that we're going through at once. But even our go to market strategies, our route to market strategy, all these things as we enter into this AI kind of 20 year AI era, you know, continue to change.

And, you know, more emphasis than ever before is put on partners. So, you know, Tom, one of the things is, you know, we're entering kind of this platform economy every from, you know, SAP to Salesforce, AWS. Every name we've mentioned so far is really moving towards being a platform company. As important as services and channel partnerships are, are the integrations now for an integration first majority buyer, the millennials?

That's the number, number one criteria, the alliances that you build. Not just with hyperscalers, with major SaaS platforms, major platforms like SAP, you're building alliances with the major cybersecurity platforms, data platforms, and obviously AI platforms. Today you're rethinking your go-to-market, co-selling, co-marketing, co-innovation, co-development, co key, uh, co-creating, and then of course every 30 days forever co keeping.

So all this happening at once. Uh, Tom, how do you kind of boil this down? Like where do channel marketers go next? You know, how do we, you know, continue to build skills? How do we look towards 2026 and, and with all these changes happening at once, you know what's the right approach?

[00:29:21] Tom Perry:

Yeah. It's a great question.

We are, we are asking more and more of our partner marketers than ever before. They have to be multi-skilled in, um, you know, any number of, of, of tactics. And, and they, they have to interface back into direct teams, field teams, partner teams. There's, there's, there's a, there's a huge amount of plate spinning that we ask our partner marketers to do.

But, but really two, two things. I'll come back to the, the, the, the in marketplace bit as well, what we're asking partner markets to do there, and we're asking them to, to do, you know, partner to partner marketing, then establish is SV relationships, um, grow within the marketplace. Prove the model, you know.

Prove that the transaction tax is worth it for, for that group to market. And that's a very, very different set of activities from traditional partner marketing, which is film funnel over here. And, you know, the vendor gets some visibility of it and, you know, leave us to sell it. So there's, there's this enormous, um, groundswell for.

As I say, partner to partner market marketing with within vendor clients. I think the, the other part of this is that we are being, and we we're advising that, you know, we, we are becoming outcome marketers. We're not, we're not, we're not gonna put somebody in front of, you know, we're the big buying committee.

We're gonna get the next step in a journey. We're going to have the next outcome in, in creating demand. And that's great, but it's only 25% of the job, whereas it used to be a hundred percent cut of the job. Get me some demand, get me some leads, get some meetings. You know, 20 years ago, you know. That was it.

How many meters you got now as you rightly say. Okay. Here is the sale. What are we doing? Are we cross-selling? Are we upselling? How do we, how do we, how do we renew? How do we, uh, improve the efficacy? What is the life cycle? Marketing skills. We need to give partners that in order that they don't just concentrate on the first 25% of the job, which is the net new bit, and what programs can we bring to bear, you know, with the complexity of marketplaces, order, whatever it might be that we know partners can get next outcomes.

And, and your, your, your slide around the, the AstraZeneca is, is to me. 12 of those interactions were, were, were, were tech target ones, right? That's, that's just the, that's just your webinars. So, you know, every webinar is a, is an outcome in its own right. An outcome and outcome. And, and, and that's complexity that we're, we, we we're trying to deal with.

And, you know, editorial engagement, webinar engagement, you know, and then, you know, you can see it's, it's along the journey. For partner market. Life's got a whole more complex, we're asking them to do more in different places, but we're also asking them to do a bigger job that used to be 25% and now 75%.

And the challenge probably throw this at Andrew, is what are the support models that somebody like SAP needs to do in place to at least start that journey? And that's.

[00:32:25] Andrew Kisslo:

Yeah, I think, um, well, one of the things I wanted to, to circle back on is like back to the, the changing dynamic of, of partner marketing as a discipline, right? I mean, I think I, I used to work for someone that would joke, I think he was joking and he would say, working in partner marketing, that's where dreams go to die.

That was like, it was probably well deserved back in the day, right? Where even. What channel marketers used to do was put out a flyer and hold a cocktail, right? And that was, um, at the time what channel marketers were supposed to do. But now the, the where ecosystems are leading and the charge and the expectation that quote, an indirect model will be the way to scale for so many companies, um, is it changes the mindset of partner marketers, the, the discipline and the skill.

You have to be incredibly data savvy and data comfortable. All the way to thinking about business models at some level. Um, and so you have to up your game. The other thing, which, um, my team knows because some of 'em are on the phone, um, would be, I really, really try to remind people, marketers need to talk to marketers.

And oftentimes in a partner marketing role, you can fall into the trap of just talking to the alliance people. Or just the alliance team on the other side, they're not marketers. Um, and so really punching through and saying, yeah, but I want to have a, a, a meeting with the marketing teams because I found one of the things is that when you bring marketers together and you look at it in integrated, uh, customer journey, um, just the possibilities of what you can do with the discipline are so much better.

Um, we've kicked off a partner marketing advisory council at SAP, where we bring in effectively the CMOs of our partners. To talk about marketing. Um, and they love it because they now understand and we're in this together and we do everything from brand work to personas to what are we seeing in the journey.

And so really upping our game means you have to throw a wider net around a community at your partner that you may not be usually talking to. Um, so I think fully embracing marketers need to talk to marketers, um, is one of the things that, you know, I really believe is kind of the next frontier of.

Changing how partner marketing is perceived.

[00:34:36] Jay McBain:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So one of the questions in the window is about par Tech, and the one thing that we know about MarTech and Ad Tech, if you, if you kind of flow through the decade of marketing, is that, uh, we, we started to form large platforms, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, et cetera, you know, created platforms.

And today we have 15,348. MarTech and ad tech ISVs that add to those platforms. So lots of choice for marketers. We start to look back in part tech and you start to look at the hundreds of examples and innovation that's going on. You know, Edison, you know, being a great example, but where this next generation might have been, you know, 10 years ago, just buying a through channel marketing tool.

You know, today there's five layers of technology to go after and get those buyer signals in those first 28 moments. And today it's five and you know, tomorrow, by this time next year it'll probably be 10. Do you see this, you know, layers of technology and, you know, channel marketers much like marketing leaders, you know, became those growth hackers and spent so much time, you know, building these tech stacks.

Can you see the future of channel marketing really becoming more technical and, and building these technologies as a majority part of your role?

[00:35:55] Andrew Kisslo:

I do for sure. I think, um, you know, and I love, I've seen this graphic before and I think it's great. You know, it, it's, um, the amount of MarTech slash part tech stack, um, dependencies going up.

I think one of the things that is such a challenge in partner marketing that, uh, I think folks forget sometimes, even if you're just a regular old marketer, um, is you're talking about multiple. Um, tech ecosystems having to work together. Let's just go back to the example we talked about our relationship with AWS.

They're in a totally different marketing stack, and so our ability to share data, figure out, um, how you can progress a lead, what signal are they seeing? Down to data taxonomy. Um, you really are, are trying to figure out how do you punch through people's firewalls and share just enough data, um, but so that everyone gets one view of what's happening.

And so there's a really a huge dependency on how platforms begin to interact, um, to gather because, uh, that's one of the things is the worst thing you can do is send a lead and then it goes into a black hole. And you don't even know where the partner is because they're on a different CRM. Um, and so really trying to reach across IT systems, um, between companies is, is I think, the next frontier of how do you, how do you begin to have one picture of what's happening?

[00:37:14] Jay McBain:

Yeah. And there's big communities that are formed, you know, talking about this technology and, you know, peer-to-peer networks of channel marketers, partner marketers coming together to do that. You start to think about the seven partners and, um, you know, millions of companies and tens of millions of people are trying to compete to get into one of those seven spots.

Do you know how many competitors we're trying to get into that, you know, one pharmaceutical example, uh, you know, to sell those consulting design implementations? So you start to think about this, you know, in totality, again, this gets into that big permutations combination. Um, you know, I mentioned that, you know, we all have all different psychology.

We have different ways that we're influenced. As people, but there is a lot of help out there in the industry, you know, great, uh, firms like Sherpa, obviously great firms that understand what people read, where they go, who they follow, how tens of millions of people are influenced, you know, one direction to the next, how they're, you know, working with clients and things like that.

But one of the surprising things is, as we've talked about, trillions of permutation, there is only about a thousand watering holes in our entire industry. You'd think with 10 million people, there'd be millions and millions of things going on every day. But it actually centers around very few. This is a Malcolm Gladwell law of the few conversation.

And so understanding this is, um, achievable. Understanding the names, faces, and places that drive this industry forward is also achievable. So kind of the last topic, you know, before we sign off was really around trust. This old adage of people buy from people they trust, people buy from people they like.

You know, I, I mentioned earlier, 75% of our now majority buyer doesn't want to talk to a human. Does this mean that it's gonna be AI slop all all way along the way? 28 moments of it is there is, is there human connection along the way? Is this here a thousand places that where we can. You know, work with people, even if they're our competitors, to level up our game.

You know, where does the industry go forward? Where do we go forward as channel marketers? Tom?

[00:39:16] Tom Perry:

Yeah, it's, it's a great point. And, and, and I've heard AI slop three times this week. Um, so it must be a thing. Um, and, and, and it is actually, and, and you know, if we're in the early days of generative AI and content production, it's fairly easy to spot.

I think one of the, I go back to an event I was at in London about a month ago, which was the, the Informa event, and day one was the field and direct marketing teams. Day two was the partner. And, you know, the, the, the, it it felt like me for, for me coming away that one of my jobs as Sherpa is to bridge the gap between the two and being best practice from one to the other.

But the interesting discussion that that first day, which was the direct stuff, was around ai. Of course it was, you know, it's, it's in everybody's front of mind, but. The third speaker when you had two speakers, ai, the third one came up, said, I still think people buy from people and we need to maintain the human connection.

And there was an audible sigh of relief across the 200 people there to say I agree. And whilst AI is hugely enabling and and does incredible things, we're seeing. An uptick in the work we do in communities, peer to communities, peer to peer marketplace marketing. And so that human element is not there.

And I think your modern partner marketeer is going to have to blend an, an expert knowledge of, of, of platforms and technology. But with this. Great sort of set of people skills as well to, to kind of drive those marketing programs forward to appear, you know, to be invited to Andrew's partner marketing advisory council.

You know, they, they're be talented and skillful individuals and so I think we ignore the human element at our

[00:41:03] Jay McBain:

Andrew, your take.

[00:41:05] Andrew Kisslo:

Gosh, I, I hope we need humans. I know, I do. I think we're, we're such social beings. Um, you know, I think one of the things that when you, we all sort of forget that, I think it's about 70% of communication is nonverbal between people.

Yeah. Right. And even in this medium that we're having here. It doesn't really replace getting in a room or having a relationship with somebody. And at the end of the day, you know, even though, um, some of the statistics will show by the time the buyer comes, their mind's kind of already made up. They still want to talk to somebody, even if it's just to validate this is the purchase I'm about to make.

And so at the end of the day, humans do have a very important role of, of relationship building. Um, especially. With some of the big bets in our world, right? You're not gonna buy a million dollar plus system, uh, by yourself with a credit card. You kind of need people to show up. Uh, you need to make sure that there's accountability, [00:42:00] joint KPIs, what does success look like?

And at the end of the day, that's something that, you know, humans turn out. We're really good at that. Um, so, uh, I think the, the future actually bodes pretty well. So,

[00:42:10] Jay McBain:

Yeah, I think, I always think of augmentation. I think of, you know, kind of becoming super human. Uh, each of us though have to be all in on the technology.

AI isn't gonna take over your job. It's going to be somebody leveraging AI is, is gonna take over your job. So we, we all need to get, get better. Uh, we're gonna have access to data that, that we've never had before, will have access to very granular parts of the customer journey and, you know, have automation tools that.

You know, we would've only dreamed about in the, you know, RPA robotic process automation days. And, um, yeah, this is gonna be a, just an exciting place to be. We're already in the fastest growing industry in the world. Uh, we're already kind of in the, you know, best seat in the house. As every [00:43:00] company realizes that partners and surround strategies are absolutely critical to becoming a platform.

So for those of you that have worked, you know, for either years or decades in this industry, this is all of our moment. And, and it's all come to now, and, and I think we're the people that are gonna drive valuations. We're the people that are gonna drive customer outcomes and obviously the, the people that are gonna understand the, the complexities of, of getting this and pulling this all together in repeatable, reliable, scalable ways.

So Tom, I'm gonna hand it to you to kind of take us home.

[00:43:31] Tom Perry:

Jay, thank you very much. And, and Andrew also, thank you so much for your really valuable input today. It's been fantastic to, to, to join, uh, a panel with, with two experts. Um, I, I would just, um, summarize by saying I think, you know, we, we picked four subjects because we knew.

Interestingly, there is a connecting dot between all four and the questions we've had come in have been bouncing around between yeah, this, this was not a linear webinar and neither, and neither should it have been. Um, but the questions have been fantastic and you know this, this is a medium to ask those questions that you might not, or, or be better.

Andrew's point earlier, but I think what there is, there seems to be a commonality around the rapidly involving environment around marketplaces, uh, digital marketing skills, the changing role and, and, and, and complexity in the sale. Of any sale of, of multiple partners, multiple touch points. My take, just to finish on is that I think the partner marketing catalog, the partner marketing technology, the partner marketing support put together by, by vendors is going to need to change.

We talked about the inflection point, but we're at. Because of the external macro, the macro environment that we've got. I think we're here now, and if there are more questions, please fire them into us afterwards. We, we gladly, um, as, as a collective, uh, answer them. So I think my finishing point is the time is now.

Have a look at your models, examine whether they're fit for the future. And, um, look out for, uh, recording summaries of this. And we thank everybody who's joined us today from wherever, um, very much for giving up your time. And, uh, thank you one and all. Safe travels, safe weeks wherever you are. Andrew, Jay, final thank you to you guys.

Take care one and all. Be safe. Thank you.