ImpartnerCon 2022: Impartner Debuts Updated Channel Management Platform
The theme of Impartner 2022 is 'odyssey.'
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Channel Futures: What’s new with Impartner’s channel management platform?
Dave Taylor: We do have a new version of it that’s fully SaaS so now quick to market. It’s a lot more about perfecting the experience both on our customer side, standing up the solution that they need to engage with their channel, but also the experience that it provides to partners coming into their channel. It’s got some great new functionality to it. The end result is you can do today what you could do a year ago, but it’s just easier, a little bit more delightful. The partners are going to have a much better experience when they land on your resources and start to consume your resources.
As far as individual products, we do have a couple of cool new things that we’re rolling out. We’ve had for awhile a product that lets our customers, the Splunk and Juniper Networks of the world, enable their channel to do Google ads without stepping on each other’s toes and without stepping on the vendor’s toes. So we call it Google Ads for the Channel. We’re now adding other social media platforms to that. We call it Social Media for the Channel. It’s cool that they’re able to to do this and enable their channel to engage in that type of modern digital marketing platform without conflicting with each other and with the vendor themselves. When there’s not a clear path to engage in digital marketing without conflict, you can now use the Google ads and the social media platforms, along with all of our other through-and-to channel marketing stuff that we do to attract new partners into your ecosystem and then help ramp them into revenue.
CF: Did input from partners and customers come into play when developing the updated platform and other products?
DT: Absolutely. We have a couple of resources that we use for that. One is our actual end-user customers, the clients that we sell to. And we’ve got over 500 customers on our platform now. So we’ve got a good, rich dialogue with a lot of them. But we also have what we call our channel chief advisory board. And we get together with our channel chief advisory board from time to time just to kind of talk through with them, [asking], “What do you see from the channel?”
CF: Has Impartner been experiencing a lot of growth? If so, what’s fueling that growth?
DT: We have had great growth. We were just looking through slides from our last ImpartnerCon, which was a couple of years ago, and we’re up over 200 customers since then. So we’ve seen a lot of growth. I think our offering is really good. But it’s also a little bit of the tide rising. Eight years ago when we took some resources and renamed it Impartner, and launched on this journey, we had a hunch that there was something to this because all of us that were involved in that startup came from indirect channel backgrounds and we understood the leverage that the indirect model gives.
We’re now eight years down the road and we’re looking at this and we’re saying, “Yeah, we kind of called that because, even in a recessionary period, people don’t want to scale back their revenue results.” They want to scale back the investment that it takes to generate the revenue results, and the indirect GTM model is truly the only leveraged model that there is. In the indirect GTM model, I’ll hire somebody to manage a couple of partners, but each one of those partners has the ability to scale their revenue way up. And I’ve only allocated one of my own resources to it. So I can scale through the direct channel, but I can only scale in a leveraged way through the indirect channel. I think that’s what’s driving it right now. It’s almost counter-recessionary.
CF: What are the biggest issues facing your partners and customers, and what is Impartner doing to help them? Is the updated platform helping?
DT: I would say that the biggest challenge for some of our customers has been … embracing some of the new GTM models through that indirect channel, understanding the value of social media and how to unlock the power of social media-based digital marketing in your channel. We’ve got an awesome product. It’s not new this time, but we do have some revisions to it. We’ve been selling it for a couple of years now, called News on Demand. It’s a great newsletter platform that’s a fresh take on the traditional newsletter, and once again, it’s a tool that people use to communicate with both their existing channel and prospective partners for their channel to try and draw them in. Most of the communication that people do with their channel partners is an email. All you’re doing is communicating with your existing team. Our newsletter lets you go broader than your existing plan, than your existing channel, and find other people.
So I’ve got a potential partner over here that’s working with one of my competitors. If I can prove to that person that I’m easier to work with than my competitor, they’ll jump ship. There’s not that level of loyalty in the channel that there used to be 10 years ago. So I have to communicate with them. I have to show them how easy we are to work with. I have to give them really good terms and conditions around an MDF program, and give them the tools to kind of execute on that. As soon as I communicate with those external partners that I really am easy to work with, they jump over.
CF: There’s a lot of economic uncertainty. How could that affect Impartner, and your partners and customers? Can Impartner help them deal with this?
DT: In a down market like we’ve had for the last couple of months, there are people still making money because they understand how to work as most of the world are watching their investment accounts dwindle. But if you’re smart and know how to work it, you can benefit from a down market as easily as you can in [an up] market. It’s a little bit that way for us in an economic downturn because some people step to the sidelines and say, “I understand that our revenues are going to dip a little bit, we’ll weather the storm and we’ll get back on it in another year’s time.” Smart people say we can’t afford a dip in revenue. What can we do to keep revenues where they are without having to invest a lot more money in the process? And this is not anything about a partner. This is about the indirect channel in general.
The smart money goes to that leveraged GTM model where what I’m doing as a vendor, I’m doing the same thing that I’ve always been doing, but now I’m using my partner community to amplify my voice. The whole value of a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) solution is that I’m not the only one standing with a megaphone. If I do a really good email campaign or run a really effective ad, or I do a really effective Google ads campaign, I’m still just one person doing that. If I’ve got 50 people, 50 other partners in my channel and I make it possible for them to use my solution, I’ve just amplified my voice 50 times. And so it’s one of those ways of amplifying your presence in the market in an attempt to stay growth-positive through an economic downturn.
CF: What are you hoping partners and customers can take back home and make use of from ImpartnerCon?
DT: I think every vendor like Impartner that has a broad platform has a few key pieces that everybody uses, a few key pieces that a few people use and a few key pieces that people haven’t kind of caught on to yet. And what we’re hoping is with the time that we have to spend with our customer base at the conference, I want to say to people, ‘You’re using our portal solution and you’re doing a great job with it. Have you thought about adding to that a referral package or have you thought about adding to that an MDF module or a business planning module?’ We hope to be able to broaden our customers use of our platform so that they’re running end-to-end programs rather than just one or two modules. As an example, we’ve got a new piece coming out that’s an auto-tiering product, which means that people come into your channel program at silver level, and if they do certain things, they upgrade to gold, and if they do certain things they upgrade to platinum and the terms and conditions change, and the benefits change. And a lot of that for some of our customers is a very manual process.
We’ve got an auto-tiering that says to the partner, “You’ve sold $1 million worth of stuff this quarter; if you did $100,000 more, you would tier up to gold, and that increases your MDF allocation, and that increases this and it increases your support.” So I want my customers to understand there are more tools available to them to continue to drive the automation and expansion of their indirect channel.
CF: What are you hoping partners and customers can take back home and make use of from ImpartnerCon?
DT: I think every vendor like Impartner that has a broad platform has a few key pieces that everybody uses, a few key pieces that a few people use and a few key pieces that people haven’t kind of caught on to yet. And what we’re hoping is with the time that we have to spend with our customer base at the conference, I want to say to people, ‘You’re using our portal solution and you’re doing a great job with it. Have you thought about adding to that a referral package or have you thought about adding to that an MDF module or a business planning module?’ We hope to be able to broaden our customers use of our platform so that they’re running end-to-end programs rather than just one or two modules. As an example, we’ve got a new piece coming out that’s an auto-tiering product, which means that people come into your channel program at silver level, and if they do certain things, they upgrade to gold, and if they do certain things they upgrade to platinum and the terms and conditions change, and the benefits change. And a lot of that for some of our customers is a very manual process.
We’ve got an auto-tiering that says to the partner, “You’ve sold $1 million worth of stuff this quarter; if you did $100,000 more, you would tier up to gold, and that increases your MDF allocation, and that increases this and it increases your support.” So I want my customers to understand there are more tools available to them to continue to drive the automation and expansion of their indirect channel.
IMPARTNERCON 2022 — Impartner unveiled a new SaaS version of its channel management platform during day one of ImpartnerCon 2022. It’s the company’s first live conference since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The theme of Impartner 2022 is “odyssey.” The conference, in Salt Lake City, Utah, includes presentations from channel chiefs and leaders from Google, Splunk, TD Synnex, T-Mobile, Vertiv and more.
Impartner’s solutions help companies worldwide manage their partner relationships. They drive demand through partners, and accelerate revenue and profitability through indirect sales channels.
Building Out Go-to-Market
Dave Taylor is Impartner‘s CMO. He said the theme of odyssey is “all about the journey of people building out their indirect go-to-market (GTM) model.”
Impartner’s Dave Taylor
“Odyssey kind of implies an ongoing progress, but it also has a lot of discovery and renovation, and what’s new along the way,” he said. “We’ve absolutely seen changes in that we’ve been in business now for eight years as a company, and 20 years before that under a different brand. But in that time, we’ve seen real growth of the concept of ecosystems, rather than, ‘Here’s my reseller program’ or ‘Here’s my MSP program.’ Now it’s much more, ‘I’ve got referrals, I’ve got influencers, I’ve got resellers, distributors and service providers. So honestly for us odyssey captures that journey of expansion and leveraging that GTM model of indirect.”
That expansion creates new challenges for Impartner‘s customers, Taylor said.
“One of the big challenges that our customers end up struggling with is how to embrace each of those new vectors of the GTM model through indirect channel,” he said. “Not everybody that has been working through distribution channels understands how to spin up an MSP channel. So they’re very different skill sets, and terms and conditions. But in our opinion, it’s a much more vibrant and fulfilling GTM model now than it ever has been. It’s just there’s a lot of kind of nuances between the different models.”
See our slideshow above for more about ImpartnerCon 2022.
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