A guest blog from Jessica Baker:
Gartner says cloud is a $204B opportunity. With over 90% of companies using some mix of public, private, or hybrid cloud-based solutions, it’s easy to understand why Vendors keep talking about Born-in-the-Cloud Partners. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?! The less obvious part is figuring out how Vendors can capture these Partners’ attention.
Before you can attract Born-in-the-Cloud Partners, you have to find them. They can be elusive. To truly court them, Vendors need to understand who they are, where they hang out, and what makes them tick.
Born-in-the-Cloud Partners are small. Sometimes very small. They’re also very nimble and can interact and react at the drop of a hat – which is why their clients love them. These Partners don’t set up a huge shop with tons of infrastructure. They find a solution that solves a business problem and run with it. They will never individually be your top-producing Partner, but they will get your product into the hands of many clients you may never reach on your own. On the flipside, the smaller they are, the harder they are to find.
These Partners tend to be hyper-focused on the problems they solve, which means they’re most likely selling to Line-of-Business clients. If pre-2016 was all about verticals, today is all about hyper-verticals or vectors – highly specialized sub-industries or geographies where the Partner brings specific value. Line-of-business buyers don’t concern themselves with IT-centric things like security, availability, backups, or compliance. They care whether or not this product solves one of their pain points. This is why Born-in-the-Cloud partners are winning. They garner specific knowledge in a highly specialized market and are recognized more for their expertise than a bigger or less specialized Partner is.
You won’t find Born-in-the-Cloud Partners dropping big sponsorships at tradeshows or advertising in a glossy magazine. These Partners tend to skip the limelight and focus on communicating directly with individuals they know. They are social media wizards and create valuable online communities for their clients. Born-in-the-Cloud Partners understand that information sharing is critical to building their brand and their status as a subject matter expert.
They don’t like traditional sales models or, more importantly, the infrastructure required to support them. Trying to manage even 10 clients with monthly recurring revenue takes away from their core competency. They prefer to sell the solution, then let the Vendor take the paper and handle all the billing and receiving. Give Born-in-the-Cloud Partners a referral fee and they’re much happier. Keep in mind they usually make most of their revenue from selling rich service offerings or consulting practices.
You won’t find them easily, but when you do locate them they’ll be together. Check out events or online communities that focus on specific solutions. Think about shows like Dreamforce, specific industry events, and industry associations where developers will be in attendance – this is where you’ll find them. The trick for Vendors is to create a safe place within your ecosystem for Born-in-the-Cloud Partners to gather around your offering.
Born-in-the-Cloud Partners value flexibility, solid solutions that interoperate easily, simple frictionless transactions, and ease of business. If you want to play along, you’ll need to loosen up some of your hard and fast rules and engage with them at their speed. They’re not going to log into your portal and take a self-paced webinar learning path that’s 30-hours long. They will, however, check their smartphone over 100 times a day and tweet and Skype and Google. The key to getting their mindshare? Deliver information in the way they want it, when they want it.
Identifying a Born-in-the-Cloud Partner is step one. If you want them in your ecosystem, the next steps are creating a recruiting program that attracts them, a ramping methodology that makes them effective, and a program that supports them. Don’t boil the ocean here. For a successful courtship, focus on identifying a handful of key Born-in-the-Cloud Partners and remember as the Partner landscape changes, Vendors need to change, too.
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