Tiffani Bova on How Partners Can Get 'Back to Growth'

Getting back to growth is almost every partner’s dream right now. That’s why you sit up and pay attention when Tiffani Bova, global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, speaks on the topic. Bova is a keynote speaker at the upcoming Channel Partners Virtual, Sept. 8-10.

Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova

While partners’ value to their customers during the pandemic has risen, knowing how to stay afloat and responsive to customers is a learning curve. Many partners lack a clear path forward. The pandemic has forced client companies to reconsider IT initiatives, which in turn forces partners to reconsider their short and longer-term business strategy.

Bova is all about thinking forward. During her opening keynote, Sept. 8 at 11 a.m. ET, she’ll share a road map for getting business back on track. That includes how to sell into your existing base of customers and/or find new business.

Channel Futures: The pandemic threw everyone into disarray. Six months in, many channel partner businesses are operating day to day. What will you share with partners about getting back on track?

Tiffani Bova: We talked here at our office of innovation and came up with three distinct workstreams. Companies can use them to navigate during this time.

CF: Let’s hear more about them.

TB: One is stabilizing the business. The next is moving back to the office. The third is “back to growth.”

The first workstream is getting people to work from home, making sure your employees are OK and your customers are OK. We can say for the most part that stabilization is behind us.

But as we come in and out of potential lock downs and spikes, people might be sent home again. So stabilizing might come in and out.

The second workstream, I call back to the office. Some industries are trying to get employees back to the office. So how do you do that? Do you stagger work hours? Does one team work 8 a.m.-noon and another from 1-5 p.m., and in between that the office is cleaned?

Or, you’re a service industry and you’re going to show up at your client’s office. Is there a protocol for keeping everyone safe? Are you going to get back to visiting clients in person? What does that look like?

The third workstream is back to growth. How do start to put your foot back on the gas on some of the things you were doing pre-pandemic? That could be marketing funds, acquisition campaigns, upselling and cross-selling.

We all have to be aware and mindful of the tone in which we are messaging. It can’t be buy, buy, buy.

We recommend that each of the streams has an entire work group focused exclusively on that stream.

CF: Back to growth is probably top of mind for all attendees. What does back to growth look like?

TB: This is the jump-off point where I get talk about how people are growing right now, why I believe that this is the year of the customer and not the prospect. I’ll talk about going into the base and cross-selling and upselling. And making sure that customers have everything they need.

I feel like the channel, especially this particular channel, is in a perfect position to help on all three of the workstreams. Working from home is VPNs, laptops, security and creating Zoom rooms, and how do you do that? There are customer service calls. If your customer service was all in one place, now it’s distributed across everyone’s homes. What does that look like? For telephony, connectivity, networking and infrastructure partners, there’s a ton of work. Even on the front-office side.

CF: So why should partners attend your keynote?

TB: It will provide an easy and scalable framework to navigate stabilizing the business, getting back to the office, and getting back to growth.