Asimily's Strategic Pivot from Direct to Channel

Embark on a transformative journey with us as Peter Hancock unravels the secrets behind Asimily's strategic pivot from direct to channel partner sales, a move that has revolutionized their global market presence. With Peter's vast experience, including his tenure at Symantec, he brings to light the critical role of executive backing in such a bold transition. We talk about crafting and ecosystem building, addressing the complex issues customers face in the realm of cybersecurity for connected devices.

As we navigate the intricacies of channel program development, Peter lays bare the approaches that have spurred exponential growth. He shares the ins and outs of implementing deal registration, margin programs, and the adaptation of sales strategies that resonate globally. The conversation takes a deep look at how Asimily values the contributions of its partners, recognizing them through initiatives like the founding members program, and emphasizes the importance of listening to partner feedback to refine the sales process, making it a mutually beneficial journey for the company and its partners.

Our episode closes by exploring the art of nurturing robust channel partnerships, where trust and respect for a partner's brand reign supreme. With Peter's guidance, we dissect the nuances of sales team education on the dynamics of partnerships, and how competition can be a catalyst for growth through strategic programs. We also touch on the future direction of Asimily's channel program and the keys to forging successful relationships that pave the way for achievement. Join us as we share wisdom from a distinguished channel sales veteran and celebrate the milestones that define a successful channel partner program.

Transcript

Peter Hancock: 0:00

So we're really leveraging not just the company brand but the channel and which partner can help open up the doors for us. So I don't think it's normal I absolutely don't think it's normal to do what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months and flip the company from a direct selling motion to indirect and have so much channel focus. I think it's actually should be, should have taken three years to get where we are today, but we've got great support from the executive team, from our CEO. The partners like what they hear. They see that they can make money with us and we do. We have worked really hard on building our story and our differentiation and that's what matters, Because at the end of the day, the customer says I know I have this problem, Now do I? I want to go ahead and address it, and that's where the partner comes in.

Maciej: 0:51

Hello, welcome and thank you for tuning in to Channel Voices, the podcast for future channel leaders, where we learn the ins and outs of partner ecosystems through casual conversations with channel professionals from a variety of industries, partner types and geographies. My name is Maciek and I'm your host, peter Hancock. Welcome to Channel Voices, thank you very much.

Peter Hancock: 1:19

I appreciate being here today.

Maciej: 1:22

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. As we kick things off, would you mind just telling us a little bit about your channel background and your current role at Asimily?

Peter Hancock: 1:33

Yeah, so my channel. So again, peter Hancock, I've been with Asimily for about a year and a half. My channel background is really someone who has lived either at the OEMs or with channel partners over the years and really look at the channel as the multiplier effect, whether I was with Symantec back in the day and we worked with our channel partners on the consulting and service side, or my most recent spend of time prior to coming to Asimily, whereas with a large services and solution provider in the US. What I really looked at is how does the channel represent and really become the advocate of the vendors, of the OEMs, but really listen to the voice of the customer and what problems are the customer trying to solve? And when you build out a channel program that is really focused on making the partner successful with their customers, then you're in a really good place.

Peter Hancock: 2:34

And the short version of the story, which I'm sure we'll dive into more here, is that when I got the opportunity to come to Asimily last year, 18 months ago or so, we were building a channel partner program from scratch. We had sold the entirety of the company 100% direct. So within the last 18 months we've moved from 100% direct to 100% indirect. Over the last 14 months or so, I was leading the partner program in our channel across the globe. We have approximately our channel across the globe. We have approximately 20 partners across the US, saudi Arabia, germany, europe and Australia, and now I'm the CRO and in charge of all global sales and our go-to-market strategies.

Maciej: 3:18

Great introduction, thank you for that. So you mentioned when you came over to, to Asimily, that was all kind of direct sales and you had to bring in the, the channel into into play and extend that sales um, that sales team, I suppose and reach more, reach more prospects, reach more customers, right? So how was the journey of launching Asimily's first channel program?

Peter Hancock: 3:47

It was only possible because we had executive support. Our CEO and our CRO at the time 100% were on board for the channel we had been really building out, Asimily to be focused on customer experience and solving complex needs that not everyone understands today the world, the landscape, the Internet, I think, and what kind of security holes it introduces to the world.

Peter Hancock: 4:13

So one you have to be aware of a problem, you have to educate your customers, you have to educate the partners that this is actually something that is going to cause could cause more potential security compromises in the world to citizens, patients, humans and kind of just overall the experiences that people have whether they're at home at their own hospital, whether they're in the city or a transportation center. So the education part was a big piece to say what is the problem that we're solving today. The next piece of it is I had to kind of go into it with eyes wide open and I had been at a partner for the previous four years and I also knew through my days at Symantec or ForgeRock or my previous company where I had been able to see my network spread out. So, as we all do over the course of our lifetime, you work with the people that you like and you work with the people you trust. When I was coming over here, I came over to a company that was very focused on selling direct through their network but realized that's only going to go so far. You can only grow so far, so fast. Great customer install base, incredible technology, really an engineering-led company for the first seven years or so. And now it was how do we shift this go-to-market so we can have rapid explosion? Because our competitors are growing at tens of 20s of hundreds of factors every year and we are primed for that as well. So let's get us in a place to say we're going to go 10X, 20x, 100x, and that's where we got started. So we went from. What is the concept of deal registration, margin programs? Are we going to be comp neutral? Are we going to be a prop? Are we going to be a margin-based program? Are we going to be a margin-based program? We're going to be a discount-based program? How does that differ in the us versus germany, versus saudi arabia? Where do we have reseller agreements in place? All of it.

Peter Hancock: 6:12

If you can imagine anyone listening to this podcast, if you've walked into a channel, it's completely built. You'd kind of take it for granted. But as you get to be at the forefront of it, it's really kind of fun and exciting. It's a lot of work. You're going through a lot of contract, a lot of process, and you're taking an existing sales team and recruiting an existing sales team to say you're going to get a whole lot more help now because we are going to go to our channel partners, our resellers and, for us, eventually, managed service providers, help be that multiplier effect, be that trumpet that just kind of gets the noise out there and gets the message out. There is probably a better way of saying that. And it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Peter Hancock: 6:54

I was able to bring on someone for North America. She and I had worked together in a previous life and my promise to her was you get to build something from scratch. You've been in the channel for, let's call it, 20 years. You've always inherited the program. What if you could build the program from scratch? And that was intriguing enough to say let's come on over.

Peter Hancock: 7:23

Same conversation with a gentleman that runs EMEA for us. He's based in the uk and he's built out channel programs in the past. He's always kind of had oversight as to what they wanted and how they wanted it. For us it was here's your landscape who are the partners that you want to go after, who are they distribute the value-added distributors, value-added resellers and who are the? Who are those partners that are actually going to make an impact for us? And he was also able to do that. So today we have and I had a big boss of Yetis over here just a few minutes ago. We have what we call our founding members program and our founding members program is the first sales team, so account exec and sales engineer and potentially channel manager, if that person is part of that sales cycle that we consider our founding members Because we know that, as you're bringing in not a startup technology, we're not a startup technology. We've been around a long time.

Peter Hancock: 8:18

But it is a newer technology. It's a newer part of the threat landscape that not all CISOs are aware of. You are now a founding member of our success and we appreciate you for that, and that's kind of one of the unique things that we're doing differently is to really appreciate what our partners are doing for us as a company and at the same time thinking about where else can we leverage their expertise, their skills. There's been more than a few partners who said your quoting system doesn't quite work for us. It seems like it's built for more of a direct will help you. And we've got on a session.

Peter Hancock: 8:54

We've looked, they shared with how they would build a quote out. We pivoted and we fill a quote. So for we use this example a lot. I know it's more of a US-centric example, but in the movie the Nike Air movie they talk about Michael Jordan and, for those that are familiar, they talk about building a shoe around the player. They talk about a shoe is just a shoe until my stun steps into it. It's the Mrs Jordan quote at the very end. So we were kind of going through our program and we wanted to have a unique name.

Peter Hancock: 9:26

We wanted to really think about something that CRM has not had anyone else registered and that's where we came up with the program launch. So we use a lot of rocket ship and a lot of semi-sonic, supersonic in our language. But we also use the fact that we've built the program around the partner and even last week we were going through something and the partner said this is a little awkward in the flow, here's how we do it. We were able to take that, incorporate that back in and now we've got a much more efficient sales process as far as the close. And so now that we've got invoices and POs and we understand how they invoice their customer, we can actually pivot just a little bit and say we can be much more efficient and be a better partner to you.

Peter Hancock: 10:14

And I think for anyone that's been in sales for any amount of time, they know you got to make the sales cycle easy. You got to make it efficient, don't make it hard. Sales reps don't want to make it hard. Sales reps don't want to live in salesforce, they don't want to live in hubspot. They want to be out with the customers. They want to be able to sell, and the more that we can do this head the program. Support them, be successful and go make money. That's what we're doing.

Maciej: 10:36

I'm I'm glad to hear that, hey, you listen to your partners and you listen really intentionally and you incorporate that feedback and can make adjustments as they make sense. Obviously, what were some of those, I suppose, decisions that you made when you were designing that channel program, because obviously channel programs evolve right, but when you start, what were some of those most critical decisions that you had to make?

Peter Hancock: 11:04

The first one I walked into, which was folks were going from 100% direct to 100% indirect and what that meant is education of a few of the account executives who had been here in the past. It also meant the departure of one because they could not comprehend. They could not comprehend how to work with a partner and actually riled against the system and probably caused us more grief than anything else. Eventually it could cause us brand damage if we kind of let that reside. The next piece of it was really how do you work with a channel partner? How do you bring in a partner who is really? They either can get a meeting with a CISO, they have paper or they have either done one transaction or millions of dollars of transactions with this customer over the years. So they trust and the partner usually a partner account executive owns that trust and by opening us into that world, into their world, they're extending that trust. They're extending that trust and everything we do when we engage with a partner and they're selling and we're now on board with customers, is to make sure that their brand is extended into what we do.

Peter Hancock: 12:22

So every deal that we've done with the partner over the last year and we've done the onboarding. We make sure that the partner stays engaged, that they're aware of, aware of what the next steps. We had a deal two or three weeks ago where, in just speaking with a customer, he said I like everything I've seen. I want more. And that partner was able to expedite the sales process within two weeks in order to help us close within the month, which is fantastic because it gives us more revenue for that month. So that's the education of the sales team as to what does this all mean to them, because they just weren't in that cycle before and that's a little bit of the startup mode that we were in 18 months ago.

Peter Hancock: 13:04

Where we are today came out of the gate strong with a competitive margin program. We made the decision to be comp neutral. Competitive margin program we made the decision to be comp neutral. So for any of our reps out there today, the margin doesn't hurt them, and that was a big decision. That was a financial decision that we had to make, but also very well received by our partners. And then we went through a competitive takeout program. So we are offering a much greater margin to our partners. If they can actually help facilitate and help drive competitive takeout. That's where you can always go after as well.

Peter Hancock: 13:43

Then it came to kind of having a public face. So what is the name of this program, what's the brand, what's the website, what's deal, registration, all the other mechanics that you would normally see. Hiring Wayne and Diana that was two more people. We actually have a third person starting on Monday, so we'd have a second person starting on the West Coast. So Priya starts on Monday. And then we've engaged with a few partners in Australia who are really going to be our real first feet on the ground and we've got a few factors, I feel like, over in Australia. So those are kind of all the different moving parts that you could imagine.

Maciej: 14:18

I've been in situations. I've been in companies where a rep was told that you know, from now on you're going to be working with partners. For some it was a no-brainer Either they were just very clever and understood the concept and how it can help them drive their own sales. Or there was that moment where, no, I don't understand this, and why is there margins and why is my deal not worth as much as it used to be? And I'm out basically. So yeah, I've been in those situations and try to you know as much as I could at that time educate my reps in the team on how that really works. But it really everything starts with that relationship building, right? So with that in mind and you know how you structured your program, which seems it's very collaborative with the partners, right, Like, was it very hard to get off the ground? Is that something that you consciously have decided to collaborate with the partners to create that program, or is that something that just came out in the wash? That's a great question I.

Peter Hancock: 15:27

I think there's a couple times we ran into the wall and broke our nose and realized, hey, we're doing this the hard way, so let's kind of think about this. We've all been doing this for a few years. Let's just call it that Be kind to our age. Right now we have colleagues, allies, people we've worked with, people we've been in the trenches with, who are spread out throughout the world that we live in and they're more than happy to help us out, because we'll help them out. I think reciprocity and those relationships matter at the end of the day.

Peter Hancock: 16:02

I will tell you that as we were building out our quoting system last July, we realized that it was a really direct base. It had not incorporated margin. It wasn't very intuitive. We were seeing mistakes come back when partners were quoting to customers. We took a pause and said, okay, who do we know operationally as some of our partners let's call them up, I'm just giving feedback and said here's our quote how would you enter this into the system? We entered it in and we saw how they did it. There's a few mistakes here. There's room for improvement here. So that piece of it was a just realizing that we weren't exactly where we needed to be. So we took the feedback and we've made it better and it's been a better experience, better selling process with that partner, and all the others have benefited as well. That's been a better experience, better selling process with that partner, and all the others have benefited as well, so that's been a fantastic piece.

Peter Hancock: 16:57

I think the other two elements that I would say that were one react and two proactive. I'll talk about proactive for a second. It's really mapping the customer journey. We are like you said, we're in a newer space. We are like we said, we're in a newer space and the customer journey is one where the security leader has to be aware that this actually could be a problem for him or her and they need a little bit of education.

Peter Hancock: 17:24

And the buying cycles vary from industry to industry. Whether you're in healthcare, you're a city. You do a lot with smart cities, smart buildings. So all those cameras and badge readers and TVs and traffic signals and water control systems that are in the cities today or even on college campuses, those are different kind of buyers and we've learned that each partner has kind of has different kinds of relationships to those different buyers and, for example, yesterday we hosted a webcast podcast to to the U S for smart city, smart building and for transportation through our partner, and our partner has the contract and all the elements in place that we need to do the transaction, but they also have that customer list.

Peter Hancock: 18:19

Yeah, we also did the same thing with it. We're doing the same thing with a partner in switzerland too, where they've got. They've got relationships where they can bring us in the door. They just need a little bit of education. So, as we're looking at how do we truly scale the larger firms some of the distribution firms have their own inside sales teams that we are now really working to educate and leverage to help drive conversations and deals and we're finding now, a year and a half into our channel program, that the most effective thing that we're doing are these webinars, are these kind of call campaigns where a year ago we wouldn't have been able to pull that off. We just had too much on our plate. But now the problem is understood much better by the industry and we're now putting a lot more thought leadership content out there. So our marketing team has done a fantastic job of really driving thought leadership and getting us in front of the right conferences and getting on. That is kind of driven by feedback from the partners.

Maciej: 19:39

Have you ever been working in such an environment, in such a situation? If yes, could you elaborate a little bit? And if not, how does that compare to the other channel programs that you've been working within?

Peter Hancock: 19:56

I'd say I've got kind of two parts to that question. The first was my previous life, before Asimily. I was in a position to work with a lot of startups and companies that weren't the mega, not the CrowdStrike, not the follow-up. I mean, we worked with them too and they were number one, number two, number three of our partners right, hundreds of dollars. But we also had all these other companies where you knew that they had value. They were differentiated but they really needed help with their messaging or they really needed help kind of doing a proof of concept or their sales cycles messaging, or they really needed help kind of doing a proof of concept or their sales cycles. And every once in a while you get a. You get a phone call from a pre, from a colleague saying, hey, I joined this new company. It's really cool, get me on your line card. Okay, that's really cool, but are you the same as the 40 other vendors in your space either? What are you doing different? And there was one or two um, and I think of one. It was a really cool kind of like honeypot technology and the this.

Peter Hancock: 21:01

The head of sales and I were friends from a previous life and we got to meet at rsa a few different times and kind of just walk through what is the buyer journey, what is the customer's experience? How do they make money? He was really kind of open with us and then we started to be able to go on to join customers together and that's where all the magic happens. I think anyone who's ever sold through the channel knows that at the end of the day, it's seller to seller, it's seller to seller. We get along, we like each other, we're going to do some good things together and the customer trusts me as the partner. So if I bring you in, you better not screw up, and that's what I witnessed. That's the takeaway. One of the biggest takeaways I had from my last four years is that the really most successful companies that we were able to onboard were the ones that wanted to work with us, could absolutely tell the differentiation, tell their story, and that's what we're doing here is we are now. I'm now. I'm in those shoes and I'm going to my former colleagues, my friends, and saying, hey, we've got something really cool and differentiated here, and for some I it took me a year to go address, because I know once I open, knock on that door, that person is going to open us up to 20, 30 accounts and we were probably just kind of getting our feet underneath as far as getting wins in the channel.

Peter Hancock: 22:27

Our WinWire program is really starting to take off. Our channel program is really starting to get some recognition. We've been on planes pretty much 50 weeks out of last year getting around to different sales kickoffs and different conferences. We actually just finished one in Germany this week. We've got Saudi Arabia in two or three weeks, the Gulf Information Security Conference. One of the large 40,000 people I think will be there. So we're really kind of leveraging not just the company brand but the channel and which partner can help open up the doors for us. So I don't think it's normal I absolutely don't think it's normal to do what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months and flip the company from a direct selling motion to indirect and have so much channel focus. I think it actually should have taken three years to get where we are today. But we've got great support from the executive team, from our CEO.

Peter Hancock: 23:24

The partners like what they hear.

Peter Hancock: 23:25

They see that they can make money with us and we have worked really hard on building our story and our differentiation and that's what matters.

Peter Hancock: 23:32

Matters because at the end of the day, the customer says I know I have this problem, now do I want to go go ahead and address it?

Peter Hancock: 23:38

And that's where the partner comes in. Um, for example, we were on a call it was yesterday um customer, I was kind of comparing apple, you know us, us to our competitor, apples to you know, oranges, maybe, maybe green apples to red apples, and it came down to okay, you're trying to compare everything Asimily does to their competitor, what's really important to you. And that's a conversation we, being new to the CISO, could have had. The partner's been working with them for five years, so they were able to call in and say okay, let's go have lunch, let's go, let's go have a coffee, let's talk about what's really important to you. That partner was able to come back to us and say here's the three things you need to go figure out and go message to this prospect, okay, and you'll be closer to winning this deal. And when we see that time and time again, then you get believers in your sales reps and then, at the end of the day, they really start to drive the story and they start to drive the success.

Maciej: 24:44

Excellent. So you listen to your partner's feedback. That quoting example that you have given is really good. But obviously every partner is going to have different needs. They will give you feedback that might contradict with another partner's feedback. So how do you balance the need for that consistency and standardization within your channel program but still kind of maintaining that flexibility that's required to accommodate partners' needs?

Peter Hancock: 25:19

We did something very specific last year. One, because it's a bandwidth right. When I first got on board it was just me, and then we fired Diana, then we hired Wayne and now Priya starts Monday. So we're building out the team. We also didn't go out and get 300 partners. We didn't go out there and say we're going to build, launch and we're going to have semi-sonic and supersonic or gold, platinum, silver I'm not a big fan of the metals status. We're going to have growth partners and we chose four. I think maybe five in the US.

Peter Hancock: 25:51

Each one had a different kind of view of the world. One was really deep into healthcare. One is really deep into helping startups get going. They've been fantastic about leaning in and helping us really get going. Another is kind of more established and they've got some more under-term relationships in paper in a lot of different places. And then the final is we needed a distributor. We need a distributor to help us and really help us drive not only just distribution, where we didn't have paper or a partner didn't have paper, but also eventually help us with our state and local education, higher education accounts. So those are the four we went after. It took almost nine months to get everyone's paper signed.

Peter Hancock: 26:36

And then we started doing the same thing in Europe. So we looked at Europe and said we've identified a distributor in Ireland, one in Switzerland and one in Riyadh. Those three distributors are our main key focus and we are going to work with them as needed. So we didn't scale ourselves out, inspire ourselves so thin that we had to make everyone happy. We didn't make four or five happy in the us, three or four, two in australia. So we it's a little easier to balance on that tightrope when you're not dealing with, you're dealing with a manageable amount and it's worked.

Peter Hancock: 27:17

I have to order some more Yetis because we need more family member mugs out there, but it's worked to really personalize the story and experience. And, for example, we were at a partner sales kickoff earlier this year in February and we not only just showed up as Asimily, but we showed up Asimily with their wearing their logos as well to really say we're part of your family too. So they, for a moment, wait a second. Who do you actually work for? It was kind of fun, but it's the attention to detail that matters. I've said this time and time again and some people I worked with in my previous life we talked about attention to detail as one of those things that really matter because, at the end of the day, the small things can make big results.

Peter Hancock: 28:12

And you just got to make sure that your customers know that, as you're building trust within the department community, that every little thing matters. And it's hard, right, because you don't want to let those balls drop and if they do, you want to pick them up fast. And that's happened to. Um, you know, balls have dropped, but we we respond and we pick them up fast.

Maciej: 28:31

Thank you for that there's a lot. There's quite a few things that you mentioned that keep coming up in conversations that I'm having in my professional sales career. Some of those you know I'd be speaking to companies who are thinking about the new go-to-market strategy. They understand that channel is very beneficial to the sales motion, but they want to go and you know they want to sign paper with as many partners as possible and as many geographies as possible.

Maciej: 28:59

Right, but that is so difficult, um, or sorry, it is so easy to do but you can't execute it because you don't have that bandwidth that you were talking about, right? I mean, how are you going to train your partners if you have a hundred of them, you know overnight? Mean, how are you going to train your partners if you have a hundred of them, you know overnight, and how are you going to service them? I mean, those partners have needs on an ongoing basis. So you need, you know, some human interaction and I've never met with anyone from an organization that does go to the market through the channel that have an overstaffed channel team. That just doesn't happen.

Peter Hancock: 29:36

That doesn't happen, no, no.

Maciej: 29:39

Right. So yeah, as you were talking about this, I was just nodding here because I've heard it so many times where some companies or you know, some leaders not necessarily companies, but some leaders have come in, made some very quick decisions that just blew up in their face and they had to retract and rebuild. Right, it's that crawl, walk run approach really works, especially within channel. It's all about relationships. It takes time to develop them and on top of that, it's training the technology.

Peter Hancock: 30:11

You're selling trust, right, you're selling trust. You're selling trust, you're selling confidence. We actually had this conversation two weeks ago I think it was um one of our customers, in order to buy uh, really one. They're. They're not customers, they're clients right, they're making a significant investment in what you do and and making sure that you are the right provider to safeguard their patients, their citizens, their consumers. The other part of it is we really kind of walk through their journey.

Peter Hancock: 30:42

We did our typical bid deal review, like we've all done in our past, and at the end of it the answer we had was they're buying confidence. They're buying confidence that they're going to displace their incumbent A and they're going to go with us, that we've done this 100 times before. We know what we're doing. We know what the outcome is. We have the relationships with our alliance partners that are the big OEM. So a lot of what Asimily does is integrate with vulnerability management and network and endpoint, because the more we can help you see everything on your network, the more we can protect your network. So the relationships that we've built over the last seven plus years with those kind of mega OEMs matters, and those are the phone calls we roll and make during the course of those evaluation cycles that really show the difference to our customers, during the course of those evaluation cycles that really showed a difference to our customers.

Maciej: 31:34

And, as you're looking ahead you've been at Asimily for 18 months how do you envision the future direction of Asimily's channel program? Are you already thinking of potentially some strategic changes to this? Are you going and look for more distributors, more value-added resellers, anything that you can share with us what the future might hold for a Simulist channel program?

Peter Hancock: 32:01

I actually had this conversation with one of my people last night. We're good on who we've signed up so far. Now it's a little bit of who's going to rise to the top and who's going to really be the the, the partner of the year when we're at our sales kickoff next year. So I I've been very conscious to say you know there's a partner of the year, you know program next year because we're in year two, right? So we want to. We didn't want to rush and be premature and say, uh, mr, we didn't want to rush and be premature and say Mr and Mrs Partner, you did three deals with us and you're the partner of the year. No, we want to say there's sustained momentum here, there's sustained revenue. You were a household name within your organization of 2,000 people. That's really kind of a bold goal, a big, very audacious goal for us. Second is, who is that part of the year at Sales Kickoff who's going to be on stage with us as we're doing a success story of how to solve for the channel, with the customer on stage? That would be another great thing. Everyone does it. But when you're moving from where we've been over the last seven plus years to where we're going. It's the things that we all take for granted when we're larger organizations that we're bringing forward into the culture of this company. And the other piece of that is really celebrating all the wins, celebrating where we get wins, so not just when you get a PO, when you close a deal, but all the little things that matter. Of course there's a lot of operational pieces that we're getting really tight on and we celebrate those almost every day. Now it's been really fun to see everyone kind of rowing in that same direction.

Peter Hancock: 33:43

There's a you're from the UK, so 2000. You probably remember the great British rowing team winning the gold medal in Sydney, australia, and they're the leader of that team and now has a podcast and a leadership series and all sorts of things over the course of time. For those that are not aware. And the name of the company is what makes the boat go faster, because that was their mantra back in the late 90s, going into 2000. They lost either. I think they turned seventh in 96 and in 92.

Peter Hancock: 34:20

And they were just how do we go win the gold medal? How do we get to the gold medal? How do we get to Sydney and get the gold medal? And it went from everything to realizing that people were going sneaking in more gym workouts. They were not sleeping at night, they were eating ice cream. They didn't have the right sheets on the oars, so they had headwinds. And when they paid attention to every little detail, the team worked together. That mantra of what makes the boat go faster got them the gold medal and we've adopted that ourselves. Is what makes the boat go faster. Faster because we're at a great size and we're going fast and we want to make sure that this is a true team effort. So probably not an advantage to your future of the chair program.

Peter Hancock: 35:06

But that's really the kind of the mindset shift and anything else that we're really continuing to support.

Maciej: 35:12

So what I'm hearing is there's no big changes coming up in terms of how the program is structured. It's really solidifying on all the good things and refining those small things that are going to make you go faster.

Peter Hancock: 35:24

Yeah, we've got a great foundation. We've got a great team, great support, yes, super.

Maciej: 35:33

And one question that I always ask what's the one thing, peter, that you wish you knew before you started your career in channel?

Peter Hancock: 35:42

before I started my career here, as similarly or in channel in general in channel in general.

Maciej: 35:47

What's the one thing you wish you knew?

Peter Hancock: 35:51

I think for, similarly, that I should have accepted not to sleep, uh, but I think the channel in general um, I'm gonna phrase it a different way, if you don't mind. Sure, the one thing that I pass along to people who are now that I'm kind of just pay it forward mode is relationships matter and the people that I've talked to. Some of the names that I mentioned today, I worked with 15 years ago, our head of revenue operations. I've known her 12, 15 plus years, the woman that is running sales and management for us. I knew her like three careers ago. These are the relationships where, now that we're in the positions that we are, we can bring it all together and bring the dream team together.

Peter Hancock: 36:38

But at the end of the day, I had a sales leader named John who really taught me that relationships are so key to everything we do. And it sounds very simple because in life we all have relationships. But it's those relationships that matter, that tie us through, and there's ones where I think, for anyone listening who's younger in their career, you may have an inaction with someone five years ago that you think you'll never see again and then, 15 years later, they call you up and say I need someone that does what you do, and you may be surprised by that phone call, but it's because you had an impact on that person 15 years ago.

Maciej: 37:18

Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Peter. Thank you so so much for joining me on the podcast. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, Wishing you all the best and to a simile in the future, Looking forward to seeing the news who the partner of the year is going to be at your kickoff.

Peter Hancock: 37:37

I have some bets out there, yeah.

Maciej: 37:39

I bet you people are betting internally of who that's going to be and a lot of the sales reps are probably doing everything that it is the partner that they look after, right?

Peter Hancock: 37:50

Yes, exactly this has been a pleasure. I love sharing the story and sharing our journey and hopefully this is good content for you and I appreciate the time.

Maciej: 38:04

Thank you so much, peter. Thank you, and that's a wrap for this episode. I do hope you found it valuable and, if you did, please make sure to subscribe and leave a review. You can also follow Channel Voices podcast on LinkedIn, twitter and Facebook, or just visit channelvoicescom, where you can send me a message or leave a voicemail. All of the links are listed in the show notes and, once again, I appreciate you tuning in today Until next time, thank you.