The Jaws of Life for Channel Partner Programs: Lessons from Peter Radizeski

Sales may seem straightforward, but it’s really a craft that involves more than meets the eye.

Peter Radizeski is a go-to-market specialist who understands sales, strategy and enablement.

He’s spent three decades coaching sales teams and advising communications service providers (CSPs), internet service providers (ISPs), managed service providers (MSPs), and unified communication as a service (UCaaS) and VoIP providers seeking a magic bullet for the channel.

In this interview with Bospar’s Eric Chemi, channel expert Radizeski of RAD-INFO Inc.:

Here are key segments from that conversation. Click here to view the entire podcast.

You recently wrote the article, “Until You Listen, You Won’t Know.” It’s about a VP of enablement who fed AI transcripts from her SaaS company’s top sales reps and found the three who crushed it compared to colleagues didn’t follow the corporate training playbook.

Radizeski: I am on a lot of sales calls. I have also managed sales teams and done loads of sales training. Getting people out of their habits is really hard.

In the partner community, we get companies to examine characteristics of their top salespeople and try to replicate that. But this is the first time I’ve seen a sales team actually do that.

I was on a sales call today with the CEO of a client, and he did most of the talking. I thought, “Wow, you’re doing this wrong.” The whole idea of a sales call is to let the customer talk.

Ask questions. Let them talk. Take notes. Figure out what the pain points are. Then propose a solution. Don’t talk your way into a sale. It’s better to spend most of the time being quiet.

AI note-taking tools like Read AI and Otter list a score on the bottom of how often you spoke during the meeting. Those are important metrics to look at. If you’re doing the most talking, you’re probably doing too much selling and not enough listening, which is required for selling.

Sounds like listening has been an important part of your work as a consultant as well.

Radizeski: I’ve had some really interesting projects over the years.

A couple of times, companies just hired me to walk around their office, listen and then figure out what the problems are that the company’s having. I would just talk to a lot of employees and then come back and give them some feedback on what I heard and what’s going on.

Other times, it’s step back, look at what they’re doing and figure out how to implement better practices to be more effective. That happens a lot in the channel programs. Because people who had programs that were targeted at a specific business model partner, then tried to take that program and widen it, have found it breaks the business model once your partner differentiates.

The best example is hardware companies like Cisco that are now going all software. But their partners’ entire business model is based around pushing boxes. Pushing software isn’t really something they have a skill set or a business model for. They haven’t figured out how to compensate salespeople or what they’re going to do with their tech staff. All these things break.

Companies need to analyze all of that and then figure out how to tweak this or change that so the program can work for a different business model – and also maybe to figure out how to help their partners advance their businesses to today’s model.

You’ve seen companies from many angles given your decades of working as a consultant, sales trainer and motivator, telco agent and writer. How does that affect your perspective?

Radizeski: I see the whole process.

Take lead gen. The most important part isn’t actually generating the lead; it’s tracking it through the sales process and making sure it drops into somebody and that person acts on it within five minutes. Because the lead only has a 30- to 45-minute bake time before it goes bad.

If you’re doing lead gen, you can hire a third party. I have a lot of clients that do this. But then companies wonder: What happened to the leads? They don’t know. Well, it’s the process, right?

So, I’m not looking at one piece, I’m back-trailing a process. Where is it going to break?

This all looks good here. But maybe here it’s broken or it’s going to break here or you didn’t think about how you were going to track it along this way.

You mentioned the historical disconnect between operations and sales as an example.

Radizeski: This doesn’t happen so much now, but operations and sales were always at odds.

Sales would sell whatever they wanted to sell, then throw it to operations to deliver it to the customer. There were ways we worked to make sure the process wasn’t broken as well.

We’d bring operations into the room to talk to sales and find out that they didn’t have good product training. Or maybe the sales engineer wasn’t being engaged when he should have been.

All those little pieces really helped a lot of my clients because I was able to step back and go, “We analyzed your process from A to Z. You’re stuck at M, and M and K are just broken.”

If you just look at product or marketing, or you’re just training the salespeople, you don’t see the whole picture and all of the places that it can fall apart.

You compared what happens when companies have limited views of things to a car crash.

Radizeski: It’s like a channel program designed for a VAR (value added reseller). Then the company tries to sell it to an MSP or agent, and they don’t understand why it’s not working.

The business model isn’t the same, so they don’t engage with the program the same way. It all looks great until you’ve seen it in the street and you’ve watched all the car crashes.

I’m lucky enough that I get to see the car crashes and traffic flow well too.

We want to hear more about the car crashes.

Radizeski: Around 2006, I worked with a company that had just gotten its partner program running. Then they couldn’t keep the product working. For nine months, they had a crash a week. After all the time, energy and money they spent recruiting partners and getting them up and running, only six stayed. The rest bailed out. That’s probably the worst mess I’ve ever seen.

I’ve seen other situations in which vendors decided to go to the channel, not realizing the buyer was the CMO. Basically channel partners don’t sell into the marketing department. We sell to the tech department or utilities or network teams. We hardly ever touch marketing.

So they spent all this time and money. They were at events pushing it. Then four months later, they don’t have a sale. They asked me what went wrong. I explained that they had a partner fit mismatch, because their buyer persona did not match up with the partners they were chasing.

They didn’t even know that was a thing. People at the company asked me, “What do you mean? That company is who we want as a client.” I said, “Yes, but the buyer is not who they talk to.”

They’re thinking, “Why can’t they just get into that department?”

But that’s not what channel partners do. “Hey, could you hand me off to the marketing department so I can go talk to them about buying this other tech?” That rarely, rarely happens.

How do you help these companies? What’s your advice?

Radizeski: You’ve got to have a better partner fit. You’ve got to have a partner profile.

To do that, you have to have a customer profile and a buyer persona. Who’s the buyer? Who’s your ideal customer? What partners touch both? If you don’t know, that’s mainly the problem.

When you ask most vendors, “Who’s your customer?” They say, “Everybody.”

No! You’re not Lay’s potato chips. You’re not Hood milk. Not everybody is buying your stuff.

I try to bring it back to Earth.

You emphasized the importance of incremental scaling. Please explain.

The largest alternative carriers – Cbeyond, US LEC, PAETEC – maxed out at 55,000 customers.

Scaling should be about getting the next 1,000, not needing to get a million customers.

It’s getting 1,000 that will pay me, find me valuable and I can profit off of. And then repeat.

But these companies all have this mindset that they’re going to turn it on and a million people are going to come through the door and want to buy it, and they’re going to be AT&T.

The reality of the situation is that’s just a lousy way to go to market.

Could you please leave us with one more piece of advice for companies, especially up-and-coming ones, that want to have a better partner fit and reach the right customers?

Radizeski: Use the formula for Startup Week, a program I’ve mentored lots of startups through.

If you don’t have customers yet and have just wireframed your product, go to the mall, talk to people about your app and get their feedback. If you already have customers, talk to them.

If you don’t know, this is the best way to find out.

From that feedback, you can figure out the benefit.

I’ll give you an example.

Back in 2005 or 2006 I had just sold a customer his first UCaaS thing. I asked what he liked about it. He said voicemail to email because he’s on his Blackberry a lot and is always fat thumbing. Now he could just forward the voicemail to whoever needs to read it to go help that customer fast. I’m thinking, “Voicemail to email is the simplest feature that we have!” But that’s a customer voice. Voice of the customer is the most impactful thing, if you’ll just extract that data.

So, go talk to customers.

If you don’t have a lot of them, think about a trial and then see how they play with it.

In the beginning, RingCentral used to track everybody that went in their portal. If you didn’t log in on the first day, they would call you and say something like, “Hey, you didn’t log into the portal. You know, you don’t really need a phone. You can do everything you want right through the portal. Let me talk you through it.” Why did they do this? Because they knew that if customers didn’t interact with the portal in the first week, the chance of churn was 90%.

 That kind of data and feedback loop – that’s the lifeblood of a startup.