If this time last year you weren’t thinking about how new marketplace models will impact your channel sales and marketing strategy, you probably were upon hearing that Pax8 just hit a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue. The brand reported working with 25,000 partners, serving more than 400,000 businesses and hosting more than 85 vendor partners in its cloud marketplace. It all adds up to more than one million transactions per month. When most executives do think about digital experiences such as marketplaces, they tend to view them as a type of “direct route” to the end user. The customer’s digital experience, in turn, is almost always designed for customers to engage digitally and directly with the vendor, argue researchers at Technology & Service Industry Association. The temptation is “to keep partners out of the planning or suggest plans to add partners at some point in the future,” write Anne McClelland and Jared Raftery, XaaS channel optimization researchers at TSIA. “It is, unfortunately, rare when the digital customer experience is designed initially for partners to engage with customers through the vendor’s digital customer experience,” said the researchers. That type of thinking won’t work moving forward, warn TSIA executives. The ability to support quality end-to-end digital customer, partner and employee experiences, all while driving value for provider, partner and customer – throughout the entire customer lifecycle – cannot simply be “bolted on” to legacy capabilities, they continue. Just as the customer has its digital journey map, so must the different partners, and those maps must start at the beginning. Not that it will be easy. Designing and developing an intuitive, engaging and successful end-to-end digital customer experience is complex enough. Adding third parties to the mix makes things incrementally complicated. But partners need data to deliver business outcomes, argue TSIA researchers. “Partner customer success teams are handicapped without access to customer usage data, telemetry and analytics.” That can include the availability of consumption analytics, customer usage data, product telemetry, access to APIs, demo platforms, and having the ability to manage partner engagement with the vendor, ideally through the vendor’s platform itself, the TSIA researchers begin. “Optimally, these tools extend to the partner management team, giving these individuals a single pane of glass to manage the entire partner experience, supporting transparent conversations with partners around what is working, what is not working and why,” they continued. TSIA points to Salesforce as a leader in digital partner enablement. Within the Salesforce digital AppExchange, for instance, ISV partners are provided with a step-bystep guide with detailed instructions regarding how to build, test and monetize integrations and applications that leverage the Salesforce platform, they reported. Salesforce outlines how partners should package and test their code, sell their applications and take payments, and monitor orders and performance. It also connects ISVs to consulting partners, should the need arise. Again, building the partner experience into the ground floor of digital experiences won’t be easy, but the marketplace competitors that successfully leverage these types of partner enablement tools will be tough to beat. Partner-Marketplace Mapping LETTER Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Bruce Christian Senior Editor / Event Coordinator bruce@bekabusinessmedia.com Brady Hicks Contributing Editor brady@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Rob Schubel Digital Manager rob@bekabusinessmedia.com Jen Vilaboy Ad Production Director jen@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2023 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. ChannelVision and the ChannelVision logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media 6 CHANNELV ISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2023
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