Channel Futures Leadership Summit: 11 Takeaways and the Week in Pictures
We picked some of the best moments from this week's Channel Futures Leadership Summit.
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"How can you put the rubber to the road when all you hire is retreads?” said Michael Schmidtmann (far right), peer group facilitator and business coach with Trans4mers.
During the keynote panel discussion on agents pivoting from sales reps to sales leaders, Schmidtmann stressed the importance of hiring for talent and training for skills.
“The most attractive candidate for many of you is going to be somebody who already knows the business. You say, 'Well, it’s one thing I don’t have to [train them]. They already did telecom, they know how to do it and they’ve got maybe a customer set,' but those are retreads. You can see that they’ve gone from job to job, to job to job. They’ve never really built a career arc. And so we call them retreads in the industry," he said.
-Edward Gately
Vince Menzione, CEO of The Ultimate Partner, knows a thing about the explosion of cloud marketplaces. Among his career highlights is a nine-year run as GM of sales and strategy at Microsoft.
Menzione told the Channel Futures Leadership Summit audience that it's critical for partners to understand what has become a $45 billion marketplace opportunity.
Menzione delved into the implications of working with hyperscaler platforms, and offered advice on helping customers to source the right applications and services.
Furthermore, Menzione implored partners to develop a marketplace strategy now before they fall behind.
-Craig Galbraith
“We need leaders to help us move toward the uncomfortable," said Eric Boles, president of The Game Changers, in his keynote.
Change is uncomfortable. It frequently meets resistance because of a lack of understanding or sense of direction. Leaders can help overcome this by providing clarity.
“Confusion diminishes effectiveness; clarity strengthens it,” said Boles.
Takeaway: What Boles says all but confirms that business leaders have to be steadfast in their approach to leading and that there will be discomfort, but the way the approach leading will determine the outcome. The ones who are in the end successful, are the ones who are calm, measured, and make rational decisions for the betterment of their firms.
-Moshe Beauford
“You can have all great ideas in your head as an executive leader. If you can’t articulate that clearly and get the organization to buy in and follow you, you’re just not going to get very far,” Ensono senior vice president and managing director Paola Doebel said.
A panel of executives from top ranked MSP 501ers encouraged partners to make sure that they’re communicating fully and clearly to all the employees in their organization.
Expedient CEO Bryan Smith said most people in a company rarely communicate with people two levels away from them in the organization. That can create a game of telephone when the C-suite is trying to communicate its vision down to the front line. Panelists encouraged partner leaders to spend time with individual contributors to understand the challenges they face, as well as to leverage middle managers to translate their message.
“You can have all great ideas in your head as an executive leader. If you can’t articulate that clearly and get the organization to buy in and follow you, you’re just not going to get very far,” Ensono senior vice president and managing director Paola Doebel said.
-James Anderson
“If I had a cup of coffee for every person who’s come into my office and said you need to move more aggressively all of your technology to the cloud, to which we say, ‘OK, well, what do you think you do with those 100 ships up there?’ you have no idea,” said Sean Kenny, Carnival Cruise Line’s chief information officer. "We don’t have ubiquitous connectivity to the internet."
During his keynote on the "Do's and Don’ts of Forming Lasting, Profitable Channel Relationships," Kenny talked about one of his biggest turnoffs when it comes to a sales pitch. And that's approaching a potential customer without doing the research.
"That’s a way to destroy your relationship very quickly. That person didn’t even take the time to understand the core of our business," Kenny said.
-Edward Gately
“One person can perform the task of 10 people thanks to tools such as generative AI. They don’t need gen AI to do so, however. The younger generation can do this the same without the technology,” said Dr. Ashlyn Szilva (left), CEO at research firm ANS.
That comment came during a session on the next generation of channel leadership.
The biggest takeaway is that the channel is shifting and becoming much more diverse. And that makes a lot of sense given the fact that there are so many organizations targeting diverse members of the channel such as women and people of color. It is encouraging to see as much and that was highlighted during the keynote presented by Szilva and Janet Schijns (right), CEO at JS Group.
-Moshe Beauford
Welcome to the Channel Futures family, Canalys!
Earlier this year, Informa Tech, Channel Futures' parent company, announced the acquisition of analyst firm Canalys. The purchase makes Channel Futures/Informa Tech the unrivaled industry leader with its combination of media, events and research.
It means renowned channel analyst Jay McBain (center) and his expert industry colleagues are now part of the Informa Tech family.
Bob DeMarzo (left), Channel Futures' VP of content, and Kelly Danziger (right), GM and VP of Channel, Informa Tech, welcomed McBain on stage with an Informa jersey.
-Craig Galbraith
"AI represents a generational opportunity to get better at our own business," Canalys chief analyst Jay McBain observed during the session, “AI Isn’t Going to Destroy the World: It’s an Opportunity for Every Channel Partner.”
The panel picked up on this observation, recommending that partners incorporate AI into their own processes before approaching customers with it. Enterprises can use AI to capitalize on the massive amounts of data they have accumulated.
Noting this, McBain said, “Data is the new oil and getting closer to that is the opportunity.”
And in response to repeated references to generative AI, McBain pointed out that “Generative AI isn’t a product; it’s a feature.”
-Buffy Naylor
Remember the term "cloudwashing"? That's where everyone would say they were a cloud company but ... they weren't.
Eric Ludwig, co-founder of Rise Technology Advisors, cautions partners about listening to vendors when they say they are an AI company -- because AI has become a buzzword that everyone is using these days.
Ludwig (right), joined Avant's Bana Qashu Young (left), Flowstone's Dave Ballesteros (second from left) and Miris Group's Brady Satchwell (second from right), in a conference session dubbed "Take the Lead in AI: Supercharge Your Agent AI Technology Practice Areas."
Technology advisors in attendance learned, among many things, how AI integrated into modern CCaaS offerings can help stoke their portfolios.
-Craig Galbraith
"We've got more suppliers, more technology lines of business that we can sell into. We've got bigger customers, and the population of advisors is expanding as well. And while some view that as competitive, my view is, it makes it a normative behavior that each CXO looks to a technology advisor before making a decision," Telarus CEO Adam Edwards said.
Edwards joined a panel of leaders in the tech services distributor (TSD) industry, who said they share a common goal of making the raising the profile of their industry.
"Right now we're in pockets where one CXO has success [working with technology advisor], goes to the next company and does it again and reaches out to that advisor but we're nowhere near normative," Edwards said. "And that's where we plan to be. Once it is a normative behavior, we're all in a happy place. It's really good."
Avant president Drew Lydecker said the channel is facing an unprecedented opportunity to influence IT decisions.
"Customers need the trusted advisors in a way they've never, ever needed in their lives, because nobody can navigate the confusion of the world of choice better than a trusted advisor coupled with the TSDs who are seeing the volume and the success of providers in our massive ecosystems," Lydecker said.
Even marketplace provider AppDirect, which also runs a TSD practice, envisions a future where human technology advisors are guiding end customers through procurement decisions, AppDirect chief revenue officer Emanuel Bertolin said.
Bertolin noted that many of the vendors that use AppDirect's marketplace platform are seeing an increase in digital, self-service transactions from their customers. However, he said he doesn't see a future where humans advisors are ultimately removed from that equation.
"If that really was going to happen, I think Amazon would have done it by now," he said.
For AppDirect, Bertolin part of the value proposition is giving agents a branded marketplace they can make available to their customers.
"You're basically putting a digital vending machine inside the organization and letting that organization buy what's easy to transact on upgrades and downgrades. But doing that in a way that the advisor is getting the benefit of all that and kind of owns that relationship," Bertolin said.
-James Anderson
ThreatLocker Danny Jenkins told a story about how he got 25 of 60 school teachers to email their passwords to a random Gmail address.
"And these are the people shaping our children's future," he joked from the keynote stage.
The point is, cybersecurity will always be a major threat, not just because malicious hackers are getting more sophisticated, but because, despite the warnings, the average person just isn't that savvy.
That's where a zero-trust approach to security comes in, Jenkins told the crowd. Jenkins preached to the audience of partners that adopting zero-trust principles can keep customers' data safe and operations running regardless of hackers, whether human or AI.
-Craig Galbraith
ThreatLocker Danny Jenkins told a story about how he got 25 of 60 school teachers to email their passwords to a random Gmail address.
"And these are the people shaping our children's future," he joked from the keynote stage.
The point is, cybersecurity will always be a major threat, not just because malicious hackers are getting more sophisticated, but because, despite the warnings, the average person just isn't that savvy.
That's where a zero-trust approach to security comes in, Jenkins told the crowd. Jenkins preached to the audience of partners that adopting zero-trust principles can keep customers' data safe and operations running regardless of hackers, whether human or AI.
-Craig Galbraith
The second annual Channel Futures Leadership Summit, held this week in Miami Beach, Florida, is a wrap.
Partners, supplier and distributor representatives, analysts and media packed the Fontainebleau Hotel for three days of keynotes, networking and more. The event also featured the MSP Summit, with conference education sessions dedicated specifically to managed service providers, and the Women's Leadership Summit, which brought more than two-dozen women to the keynote stage with messages of empowerment and getting ahead in business, to name a couple.
The Leadership Summit also included the biggest awards night in the channel. The Channel Futures MSP 501 gala welcomed this year's winners for a dinner and recognition for their accomplishments over the past year.
Education, as always, was the hallmark of the Channel Futures event. For instance, it furthered the conversation about the relationship between the managed IT service provider (MSP) and technology advisor (agent) communities. Many vendors and technology services distributors who may have only traditionally worked with agents in past are looking to find joint opportunities with MSPs.
Kristy Thomas, vice president, partner experience and enablement at Intelisys, said "bridging that gap" requires careful research around how MSPs, VARs and TAs – and everything in between – operate differently.
"I think that there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for the MSPs (if technology service distributors want to focus on that) in today's marketplace, for additional value-add services that they could source and layer beyond just the services they offer the marketplace," Thomas told Channel Futures. "At the very beginning, it's about building a programmatic approach that understands your partners and the value that they bring so that we can provide that adjacency to their customers."
See our slideshow above for more of the highlights from the keynote stage and conference education sessions you might have missed at the Channel Futures Leadership Summit. It includes some of the biggest takeaways from the event by our Channel Futures editors.
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