Episode 34: PCs are Back!
Listen to the Podcast
Read the Transcript
Erick and Rich discuss the coming “supercycle” of PC sales and three techniques MSPs can use to manage remote employees. Then they’re joined by Elisabeth De Dobbeleer, vice president of the Cisco Partner Program, and Ken Seitz, Cisco’s senior director of partner managed and XaaS sales, for a discussion of underleveraged revenue opportunities in security, networking, and beyond, plus the role partner programs can play in helping MSPs pursue them. And finally, one last thing: How a potty-mouthed parrot found a new loving, home.
Discussed in this episode:
Canalys analyst Jay McBain on the PC sales “supercycle”
Cisco partner managed services
Elisabeth De Dobbeleer on LinkedIn
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] Blast off, ladies
and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big in managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I am the Chief Content Officer and Channel Analyst at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this podcast.
I am joined this week, as I am every week, by your other co host, Erick Simpson, our Chief Strategist at Channel Master. Erick, how goes it?
Erick: It’s going great, rich. It’s going great. How are you feeling today? You still rolling strong from getting recharged a little while ago from a vacay. You’re, I feel the energy in your voice.
It’s awesome to have you back. How are you feeling?
Rich: I’m feeling great. And you’re absolutely right. That’s partly the effect of last week’s vacation. The other thing is as we’ve discussed on the show multiple times, I’m based in Seattle. We don’t get as much sunshine here in Seattle as you do in Southern California, but it’s the weather is perfect now It’s been perfect since i’ve gotten home and I think everyone who lives in Seattle gets a little extra Lift in their step in weather like this just because we don’t enjoy it all that often,
Erick: Rich, Speaking of Seattle, I’ve heard people say that because it’s always you know when it’s overcast, it’s not really raining You But it’s like a heavy mist and I’ve heard people call it dry rain.
Is that a thing or where somebody pull on my leg?
Rich: I we don’t actually use that term here. At least nobody I know does. But that, that phenomenon is exactly right. Everybody thinks it rains constantly here. It is overcast constantly here, but we don’t get nearly as much rain as people think.
If you look at the, the annual rainfall here, it’s not like wildly higher than a lot of other places in the country. But, the temperatures tend to be lower, which can be a good thing this time of year. And we don’t see the sun as often as we’d like, so when we do, it’s like a treat.
Let’s dive into our story of the week. Erick speaking of treats, this could be a treat for the top line at least a lot of folks in our audience. And it it concerns some reporting from our good friend, Jay McBain at Canalis concerning a quarter of the IT market that hasn’t been a source of good news.
For a while, and I’m talking about the PC market. Now as we all know back in 2020, everybody suddenly locked up at home. You’ve got the work from home phenomenon. And there was a massive wave of PC, and particularly laptop buying in the business world. That persisted through 2020, well into 2021.
And then PC purchasing dropped off a cliff. And quarter after quarter we’ve watched hardware manufacturers, And distributors report that their endpoint numbers are very poor. But it looks like that is, we’ve already seen some evidence that’s beginning to turn around there, but I’m looking at something that Jay posted on LinkedIn just a few days ago, and he is predicting what he is calling a super cycle of PC device sales coming in the next six to eight quarters.
And he points to three. Phenomena that are going to cause this to happen. One of course is it’s been three, four years since that COVID inspired purchasing wave I was talking about. So we’re at a point in time where those devices are entering their refresh cycle. It’s going to be time to replace those.
Issue number two, Windows 10 goes EOL in October, 2025. And that’s going to inspire some additional purchasing as well. The last, but far from least, really the biggest cause for this super cycle though, is the arrival this year of AI PCs. Canalys is predicting that AI PCs will be two thirds of the PC market by 2028.
And they are also predicting a 47 percent compound annual growth rate. In AI PC sales between now and then. Now as we know there are a lot of MSPs out there who either don’t sell PCs to their customers or they do, but they wish they didn’t have to, because the margins aren’t tremendous.
And it’s not a it can be a source of overhead in terms of maintaining these devices without being a major source of profit. Revenue or profit. But I’ll be curious to get your take, Erick. I really continue to look at hardware generally, whether that’s PCs or network hardware or IOT hardware, something I’m writing about this week for Channelholic, my blog.
I that’s money on the table and it surprises me sometimes how many MSPs. aren’t pulling that money off of the table. And for those who are there are some good things to look forward to. You probably haven’t made a lot of money on PCs and laptops, especially in the [00:05:00] last few years, and that’s looking like it’s going to turn around.
Erick: Yeah, it’s, I think this, We talk about AI a lot on the show obviously because it’s, it’s, there’s a lot to talk about having an impact on hardware sales. I’d never saw that coming, with these AI enabled or empowered devices, laptops, PCs, and things like that, this could be.
That next wave of revenue generation that MSPs have not seen since COVID, right? As you mentioned during COVID, boy, oh boy, we were out of stock, right? There was no supply chain because all the hardware had been sold to support hybrid workforce. Now it’s a few years later, right? In a typical kind of refresh cycle that you think about for PCs and laptops.
So I think. That’s been increasing over the last several years. Hardware is just better now and operating systems just work better with the hardware. Before we used to think, okay, three year refresh cycle back in my MSP days, right? Three year refresh cycle for, laptops and PCs too, if we could get it.
And then maybe four or five for servers and things like that. So we’re right around there, right? 2020, 2024, by the time, 2021. MSPs begin seizing the opportunity and really talking about not just upgrading the operating system from Windows 10 to 11. Let’s say, let’s just take advantage now, future proof you Mr.
and Mrs. Client, and get you into some new hardware you won’t have to worry about for many years, new operating system and AI capable. So I think there’s a lot of value in that discussion, Rich, and I’d be surprised what the numbers look like compared to traditional hardware sales. What I mean by that is there’s probably lots of inventory of not ai, un, I dunno, un AI enabled, not AI enabled hardware.
And what’s gonna happen with that? Are the vendors going to try to reduce the price dramatically to get rid of that so they can, fill the channel with the AI stuff or. Or how’s that going to work out? Because that could be, in, in the strategy that says, Oh, we want to get you into the AI laptops and PCs and windows 11 and future proof, you and all that, if the MSPs go, I don’t know, I could probably make a little bit more margin by selling them, the stuff that I’m getting on a really good discount, because we’re trying to, get the stuff out of our supply chain, it’s going to have to be a decision that the MSPs make.
I vote for future proofing. I vote for, giving clients something new and different and unique. Adding more value is always good from a, from an influence and sales perspective. And. Knock on wood, stuff will probably work better.
Rich: I suspect it’ll be a mixed use case there, but it’s going to depend a lot on who the end user is.
So if you are selling to a knowledge worker and executive, probably a sales person, somebody who really wants and would benefit from having one key access to co pilot, Microsoft co pilot. I think the AIPC is going to be hard to resist for those folks, but there are going to be a lot of folks. Out there who really don’t need that functionality in a device just based on what they do for a living and then you’re right, there could be an opportunity to to collect a little extra margin, maybe just drive some higher PC sales because distributors and manufacturers will be looking to dump some accumulated, I don’t know if that’ll be true, but it certainly would make sense.
The other thing I want to quickly point out is just that you were talking about, how, what a surprise it is from a certain perspective that there is a hardware opportunity in AI. And this was actually the subject of last Friday’s Channelholic Post as we were recording this, which was about the broader infrastructure opportunity around AI.
In fact, IDC went out a few months ago and asked, and granted, this was like enterprise IT departments, but they asked people, what are your spending plans around AI software, AI security and AI infrastructure and infrastructure came out on top. On that list, that was the number one spending priority.
Cause people understand I’m going to need new and better servers. I’m going to need some of these AI PCs. I’m going to need more storage and faster storage. So there is actually, it goes beyond the AI PC. There is an entire infrastructure opportunity around AI that is worth exploring.
Erick: Yeah, sorry. I was going to say we weren’t expecting it last
Rich: year, but boy, oh boy, here it is. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now if your entry point to that opportunity is to equip some of the end users you support with AI PCs they’re going to, assuming their [00:10:00] laptops those people are going to be able to work wherever and whenever they want, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be easy to support.
This has something to do with your tip of the week here.
Erick: Yes, Rich, and probably a long time coming, right? Yeah. And I hear this from MSPs all the time. It’s, just as businesses during the pandemic were challenged in supporting their remote staff as MSPs have evolved. Support more hybrid workforces since that time, like an accelerated pace, like we’ve never seen before.
MSPs also had the same challenge as the clients that they serve. They had remote staff all of a sudden and remote workforces. And, we all pulled together. Our MSPs clients to get through that during that process, rich, we all discovered, holy cow, there’s some benefits, and what we thought wouldn’t work from a hybrid workforce business model, some of my work, right?
So we saw business owners and MSPs think about do we really need all this office space? Can we do with smaller office space? Can we do some, reduce some of our overhead costs by doing a hybrid kind of a model or all remote models? I know some MSPs rich that definitely want their staff in the office, just like business owners do just like everybody else.
SMB, mid enterprise, we want them in the office. Some say look, we’ve reduced some of our space and things like that. We’ll have them come in once or twice a week, and we can rotate around. And when we have big meetings, we can do that. And then others are, what hybrid or complete remote works for us.
So in the latter two scenarios where you have hybrid or completely remote workforce, You still have the need to manage the staff when they’re not in the office. I think it’s easier, Rich, to maintain the morale and the performance and of course, the collaboration and the coaching and the leadership stuff that goes on the times when staff are all together at a location, but when we’re completely remote, how do we maintain that same level of morale.
Energy, sense of appreciation, and of course, performance management. And, just energizing the team, and feeling like we’re still a team. What do we do, Rich? So a couple of things to think about these communication and collaboration tools that we use on the daily, you and I, and many others in Microsoft teams, zoom I’m on Google meets.
I’m on all, just every platform, clients and prospects sometimes, have their own preference. They’ve gotten a lot better. There’s look very little lag. Audio’s good. Got a decent camera. Even the. The cameras that are coming out and coming with the new hardware are better than it was two years ago as well.
So we have that kind of opportunity to feel like we’re collaborating together, but the moment that we’re off a call, how do we maintain that level of, get after it, stay motivated, have. A process by which everyone understands what they’re measured on, what their numbers need to be.
Everyone in the organization has numbers, not just technicians or sales folks, right? We have, operational KPIs that we want to keep and, manage and things like that. We have folks that manage back office and, supplier relationships, vendor relationships. So we need, we have the one communication tool that We’ve addressed another communication tool that I really like that I use Almost always rich is an ai note taker, that’s really effective in helping me not only record the video and the audio it delivers transcripts It delivers I can slice and dice the transcript with ai.
Thank you. Ai right to look at different. Portions of the transcript I can search for different things in the transcript You And then I can tag different points in the conversation with, tags that I create, background, follow up, next steps to do that kind of thing. So I can just tag during the video and then I can scrub to it.
So these collaboration and communication tools are really advanced or mature now. So that’s checkbox number one. The platforms that we use to measure performance. It’s MSPs. MSPs are using PSA solutions. They’re using any number of third party vendor applications. In the best case, they’re integrated together.
And the reporting is where the focus needs to be here, which is optimizing the reporting, [00:15:00] making sure that what we’re that we’re able to measure performance and goals and outcomes and even employee satisfaction along with client satisfaction as well. And this is how we keep everybody aligned around what their number is and how they can stay effective and prioritizing, prioritizing what needs to be done that requires rich, a clear understanding of what their roles are, what their performance is going to be measured on more communication, more outreach from a coaching leadership, collaboration perspective, not all about business, but really getting to know.
Our team, right? Some of the best leaders that we’ve worked with rich or folks that really are people, persons, and really understand that we’ve got to reach out and communicate. And sometimes rich I’ve, at the engineer that I am in a previous lifetime, I felt Oh everybody’s like me.
They don’t need a lot of love. Don’t need a lot of touching. They just, they just need a task list. Wrong in every sense, but especially wrong when we have completely remote workforce, we have to over communicate. We have to, and learn more about our staff and our teams and just appreciate them and understand what they’re missing and what they need.
We have to listen more and then. These are those regular check ins. So we talked about communication tools. We talked about performance monitoring and platforms and reporting and things like that. And then these regular check ins and then last one, rich bonus tip is you’ve got to get everybody together once in a while.
And sometimes we’re so busy, with our head, in, in the monitors, as it were. That we don’t really think about it and rich you brought up in a conversation with me a few days ago, we’ve talked about work life balance, right? So it can’t all be about work for the teams.
I mean find a an event a trade show a conference something where Some of the team is going to be there anyway, or you just decide like we’re going there and we’re going to take the team Or if that doesn’t work, especially around holidays and special events and things like that Price your services accordingly.
So you’re making great profit and you can afford to have an event just for the team. I think that goes so far, especially in a completely remote. Work environment.
Rich: Yeah, I taking those in reverse order Maybe I mean we both know msps who insist on everybody being in the office We both know msps who are 100 remote.
They don’t have an office at all anymore And what I hear nearly 100 percent of the time from the entirely remote msps is that they will do Team activities, team events, morale building events on some kind of regular cycle. It’s usually after business hours, it’s in the evening. It might be on the weekend.
We go play softball. We have a picnic, we go out to a restaurant or something like that. But people do need to, physically recognize one another, be in the same room, have some kind of relationship that goes beyond the tools that you were talking about. What was item number two?
I want, there was something I want to say about item number two and now I forgot
Erick: about communication tools, regular check ins, performance
Rich: monitoring. Oh yeah. Reporting. So yeah, as you were talking about collecting reporting data it occurred to me, what some employers, not necessarily in the managed services world, but just.
In the world at large, what a lot of employers have been doing is deploying these sort of spyware systems to watch what people are doing remotely. Wouldn’t it be a better approach, particularly if you’re an MSP, to set very clear, clearly defined measurements of success for your employees, collect that data through the PSA or whatever other tool it is.
And do regular reporting so that you can see if people are meeting expectations or not, as opposed to making folks uncomfortable in a tight labor market by watching if they’re using some mouse jiggler tool or something like that. And then last, maybe least, but I did want to bring it up cause we were talking about AI PCs before, and you were talking about the communication tools.
They’ve gotten better. The one thing about the communication tools that is still an issue is where are my eyes? Where am I looking when I’m using Zoom, for example? So right now I’m looking into the camera because my choices with Zoom are either I can look into the camera, which means I’m looking at the audience, or I can look at you, in which case I’m looking away from the audience.
I’ve opted to look at the audience, basically, but one of the cool things about AI PCs, and I haven’t seen this in the wild yet, but I cannot wait to experience this. Apparently the cameras on AI PCs are so sophisticated that I can look at you, and the PC will compensate the image such that it appears as if I’m looking into the camera.
And it, it just [00:20:00] eliminates this so common issue that everybody deals with. So like I said, I haven’t actually seen this. But as good as the communication tools have become and as good as they are now, they’re going to get even better as that AI PC adoption way kicks in.
Erick: Yeah.
Again, AI to the rescue Rich? And, just a little bit of follow up on a couple of points that you made. Going out to Dara, things like that, that works really well when we’re geographically near each other, right? But when these, these were completely remote staff are just, that’s just not possible on a very regular basis.
What we’ve seen rich are, virtual little hangouts, like virtual, like the, the company will send out, goodie bag bags or lunch or. We’re doing, wine tasting or whiskey tasting. And I’ve even seen people hire like a virtual mixologist and everybody gets all the ingredients, we did that a couple of times. With MSP happy hour was doing that for a while with Connor and, we’d show everybody how to do the drinks and all that, then we toast and we just take, take the, it’s all about just not work stuff, just take the load off and then have really cool shareable games that we would do.
We would do like quizzes and then spin the wheel for prizes. We did all of that. When I was when we were doing the series of MSP happy hour live events. And these are things that I picked up. From other partners, from other vendors. And we would collaborate on this stuff because we’re all trying to figure out how to keep everybody engaged, during a lockdown, for instance. And the other point you made was about, oh gosh, I can’t even, Oh, I lost my train of thought now. Is it the reporting thing again? Where are we? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The mouse jiggling and all that. How creepy, right? How cringy is that? But what I was going to say is. And you were I think you were, I’m going to take the ball and get it past the, the across the goal line.
So the, this is an opportunity for us and it goes back into more regular check. And so we’re using this performance data to have more coaching and guidance. So instead of, typically we see. A yearly performance review, right? By the time the year’s up, that, that employee who has every intention of giving, the company their all and trying to do their best job and then finds out you failed over here because this or that, if you had just let me know, and I would have adjusted, right?
So having this performance data actually can help and have regular, more regular check ins and. These were, call them reviews, but more kind of coaching guidance. You can do them more often and they’re shorter, right? Some clients that I work with richer, I can’t do, performance reviews every quarter.
I recommend it. But what they’re missing is what they say as well. It just takes me so many hours to prepare, to do all the reviews every year. But hey, if you have very clear, goals for everybody and you’re measuring performance and you’re not impeding their ability to hit those numbers, like sometimes we’re our own worst enemy, right?
It’s like you have them in too many meetings. How can they hit their numbers? Whether that’s, tickets or sales or whatever, if you’re in the way. So this is a way for you to have shorter conversations. Everybody is more aligned, more consistently. And I think it just, it delivers a much better outcome for both, team business owner.
It’s more connected and we’re actually working more closely together to achieve these outcomes rather than, okay, I’m going to see the principal now or am I bringing my report card home to my mom and dad? That’s not, that kind of thing.
Rich: On the topic of working together we are going to take a break folks.
When Erick and I come back on the other side, we’re going to be joined by not one, but two very exciting guests from Cisco. We’ve got Elizabeth De Dobbeleer who runs their partner program at Cisco. We’ve got Ken Seitz. who works specifically with MSP and as a service partners. Erick I give it about a 70 percent chance I mispronounce one or both of those names.
We’ll find out after the break, but we’re very excited to be joined by both those folks. We’re going to talk about some opportunities out there in the marketplace that Cisco is familiar with and security and networking in particular that folks in our audience might not be sufficiently thinking about.
And then we’re going to talk a little bit about a topic that we’ve discussed on the show before, which is the evolution of partner programs and what that looks like. MSPs can do to get maximum value from Parker program. So stick around folks, all of that. Is coming right up
All right, and welcome to part two of this episode of the msp chat podcast our spotlight interview segment where we are very pleased To be joined, by two people, at very senior roles within a company everyone i’m guessing in the audience is very familiar with and is probably doing business with that would be cisco So our guests this week are elizabeth de dobolier if I got that right this time.
She is the vice president in [00:25:00] charge of the Cisco partner program. We’re also joined by Ken Seitz. He is the senior director specifically for managing everything as a service sales and partners at Cisco, Elizabeth, Ken, welcome to the show.
Elisabeth: Thank you very much. And nice to see you, Richard and Erick.
Rich: Thanks for having us. Likewise. Thanks for joining. A little bit for folks who are new to you. Just tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do at Cisco.
Elisabeth: Thanks a lot. I am leading the Cisco Partner Program for Cisco globally. As you may hear from my accent, I am based in Belgium but I have a global role.
So when we say partner program, we really mean. The entire end to end value proposition of Cisco as a vendor to its ecosystem of which of course managed services and the MSP partners is a big part.
Rich: Ken, your turn. Tell folks a little bit about yourself and your role at Cisco. Yes,
Ken: thanks, Rich. So part of the global partner organization focused on partner managed and as a service, as you mentioned.
For the route to market and our great provider partners, we try to build offers and programs and commercial constructs that help them be successful in the market with Cisco. And then the other part of that is making sure that we introduce our portfolio, traditionally net 30 hardware sales into a subscription and service construct, which provider partners and other partner types can use as well.
Rich: I’m gonna kick things off with a fairly open ended question. Obviously, Cisco is a huge player in networking and in security. These air our markets very familiar, important to our audience here on the show. There are other markets that you guys play in, and I’m just curious to get a perspective from each of you.
Are there opportunities? That maybe MSPs in your experience in security networking or beyond aren’t sufficiently focused on, aren’t taking full advantage of, and I’ll give you a first shot at that, Elizabeth.
Elisabeth: Thanks. So I think we have been engaging with Manoservices players for as long as Cisco exists.
But I think we really doubled down on the opportunity five to seven years ago. And so now we have a dedicated approach to really maximize the opportunity. And I think given the evolving technology, evolution in Cisco, the whole link and merging between security and networking is more relevant than ever.
So I think Ken has a specific offer development team on that. So he can tell you a bit more about that.
Ken: Yeah. I think, there’s never enough networking and security, but I think that as Elizabeth said, that’s probably where we’re best positioned with our provider partners today and where most know us from, but certainly in the collaboration space, I think with the Webex suite messaging meetings, collaboration and and calling their contact center as well, like that’s an area that we see a resurgence of, I think in a post COVID time.
Yeah. For hybrid work and the proliferate use of our video devices and observability there as well, both coming at it from a networking out and from an assurance standpoint, assuring the applications. And then coming at it more from the application side and looking at it from a pure play, a full stack observability view there, those are other areas that that round out networking and security well for us.
Erick: So Elizabeth and Ken, MSPs are, traditionally still They traditionally still have their feet on kind of two sides of service. We have kind of projects, network infrastructure projects. We have software migration, we have cloud migration projects, but then we also love recurring revenue services.
So what are the under leveraged recurring revenue service opportunities that you feel MSPs. might take better advantage of instead of seeing things as a point product point solution. How do we create managed fill in the blank services with Cisco?
Elisabeth: Ken you want to go first?
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that you touched upon a couple of points there, Erick, which which certainly resonate with me.
I think that. That transition for, what we call the managed services 1. 0 motion, where everything is somewhat bespoke or dare I say custom to more of a catalog based approach. We try to work with our provider partners to guide them through that sort of continuum, helping making sure that they are doing kind of the packaging where they can to sell at velocity and scale and repeatability.
which helps with the service delivery and the customer experience over the long tail as well. In, in terms of the specific sort of packages there, I think it, we try to take a very tailored approach with our provider partners looking at what are their core strengths, where they have relevant and adjacent market opportunities that they could build into.
What are the key verticals that they may already have is in their customer base and how do we tailor something to capture more wallet share and peer groups from that segment? But I think the key is, getting the sales motion [00:30:00] and the economic model, the commercials aligned to the way that the, that, that target customer wants to buy enterprise versus small business will be fairly different and the tighter, the bundling more so for small business than large enterprise, where we expect we have to have more flexibility.
Rich: I was at the the Cisco partner summit last year. And I, you’re reminding me, there was a lot of attention paid from the main stage to those packages. And there was a. a slide that kind of showed that there is a wide range of managed service offerings from Cisco. How does, how can a partner program like yours help MSPs understand, discover, go to market with packages like that?
What is the role of MSPs? of a partner program in helping the partners take it, take advantage of these sales opportunities and get benefit from them.
Elisabeth: Yeah. I think it has a whole there’s an end to end approach to this. I think I would start with, and I think that’s something we’ve discovered through the years.
The biggest opportunity is really making sure that our. Sellers are actively promoting and enabling and endorsing the MSP, which was a bit of a cultural change, let’s say, not just culture, but also process. And even a comp related change because traditionally they were very tuned into and used to working with their preferred reseller.
And so we, we did a lot of work around promoting and incentivizing that. engagement with the MSP. And I think that’s really important, which is something we can’t forget, meaning just addressing the MSP and making them welcome in our program as in having specific MSP focused specializations, which is our core powered brand specialization, let’s say, or making sure there are adequate incentives.
It’s just not good enough. We really have to make sure that final mile of the seller engagement is there too.
Ken: The the, in Rich, I think what you’re speaking of there is our library of partner managed ready offers which is how we would present that a little bit more externally to that our provider partners and the prospective partner base there as well.
So just extending beyond just the channel program itself. That’s the culmination of what we call it. Our three P strategy of platform preference and performance platform, meaning we want to have the right capabilities within the Cisco products and. Aggregation points of platforms that they can extend with ecosystems and easily integrate.
That’s a key element of it. And then the preference we want to be are the providers and the MSP industries go to technology provider we want to make sure that they look to us and not just for great technology, but also the know how and the thought leadership to help them scale and extend their practices and be more profitable, have a way to show their differentiation.
And then on the performance pillar of that’s really where the Cisco channel partner program and specifically the provider role shines through and we make sure that there’s a, an amazing value exchange that we have, financial and non financial benefits that we bring to our providers and where they invest into a Cisco based managed service practice that we give back to them and help them, continue with our mutual success.
Erick: Ken you just, listed out some of the. The, some of the benefits of the program that Cisco has built to support these MSPs. So I’m going to speak now as a former MSP knowing how busy MSPs are and, just their day to day operational firefighting, we’re trying to tamp out fires, but we’re also trying to be much more strategic for our clients.
And sometimes there’s not a lot of time or room. Left not being prioritized properly to work with strategic vendor partners like Cisco. Like we were, we were a very high level partner with Cisco when I had my MSP and we had to learn how to engage, right? So what are the biggest keys to, to connecting with your MSP partners?
And getting them to a point where they want to grow the relationship leading to more profitable growth, sometimes there’s that, you’ve got to, build that trust and confidence. So what are some of the keys do you think to building that collaboration with MSP specifically rather than just typical resellers?
Because there’s a difference, right? Totally.
Ken: Erick, I think we try to make sure that there’s something available for MSPs wherever they’re at that journey with Cisco. For example, we have our MSP Secure Center where providers can come and consume Cisco security software with simply filling out a form and a credit card and we’ll bill them for them on a recurring basis that way.
And that’s a little taste of the Cisco portfolio. Obviously, if you [00:35:00] have a broader need, you need our physical networking and security devices, then we have great distribution partners that the MSPs can work through there that will take them through a journey. We give those distribution partners the enablement they need to be able to engage and speak the MSPs language.
We’re constantly trying to improve their capabilities and help them through their incentives to invest in that and capabilities and sharing our knowledge. And then we have more high touch directing engagement that we use with some of the bigger provider partners to help them mature even further from even a global presence.
There’s always a room for all of us to improve. I think start small. We have that available. We have journey maps to, wherever you’re at along that we have self service content and then where we can find the matching of people and coverage, then we’ll engage in a high touch fashion there as well.
Rich: I don’t know if you have anything you want to chime in there before we move on Elizabeth.
Elisabeth: Yeah, I was gonna say exactly, it’s all addressing the different partner types or business models along customer segments also, because we see different engagements in function of, let’s say, the smaller customers and then the high touch.
So we tried to tailor to all of these different business models.
Rich: Erick framed his last question there around accelerating profitable growth. And one of the things I love about having folks like you on the show is you talk to a lot of partners, different kinds, different sizes. You have all sorts of different metrics that you’re looking at.
For which partners are succeeding and how and why. And basically there are insights and best practices that we can get from you that are hard to get from other places. And so I’ll just give you each a chance at this a little bit. Any thoughts at all about and again, if we’re focusing in on that managed service provider audience.
And any thoughts about some of the things, the best practices, the smart moves that you’re seeing your partners do that really do help them accelerate profitable growth?
Elisabeth: Yeah, I can start with a broader, I think generally our MSP partners are doing better in terms of driving profitable business than our resale partners.
So I think. There’s been a time where we actively promoted and enabled that motion as well. And then also, of course, and again, no surprise. I would guess that partners investing in more recurring business software services, and then of course life cycle, right? So ensuring that stickiness of the customer along the journey of the customer.
That always is better in terms of driving profitable growth. And we’re trying to cater to that in our different programs also by making it easier for MSPs to engage with software and services and lifecycle.
Erick: So in terms of, sticking with the MSP focus here as knowing that the MSPs are very unique, because of that trust and confidence and that authority that they have and influence with their existing clients.
How can Cisco help MSP partners not just go deep into their existing customer relationships, but go wide? So what are like, can you share maybe three tips with an MSP that may be, a new partner with Cisco? Are there some motions that a new MSP does that are the low hanging fruit opportunities?
And then as they grow, I know, Ken, you mentioned before we went live, that there’s some different types of services and solutions. What do you see in terms of the motion that an MSP takes to grow wider with their existing client relationships, Ken and Elizabeth?
Ken: So I think looking for those adjacent technology areas for within existing customer bases the easiest, those are existing relationships that you have.
Just understanding what are their needs and what are you being asked for? Erick, I grew up on the operator side of things and have only worked in an MSP space my, the entirety of my career. So I always smile when you say the focus there, cause that’s that’s the conversation I want to have naturally, but.
I, I think for me on a, as a, as an MSP product manager, you would get that feedback for what customers are asking you for, and you’re having to say, no, I’m sorry, we don’t have that today and hopefully keeping a register of those requests. So as you can get to where’s the grouping or the mass of those requests coming from, I hope is that the Cisco portfolio can help you address that and branch into further and existing, bigger wallet share within the existing customer base.
I think beyond that, it’s looking for where you naturally gravitated towards over the course of selling. In my experience, you might not start off with a verticalized sort of sales approach, but it tends to be more horizontal wherever you can get relevance and wherever you can get an audience that’s built off of relationships of your sellers with the buyers across the table, so to speak.
But then understanding like where have you gotten a concerted mass there of one or two particular [00:40:00] verticals and trying to go a little bit deeper and trying to bring in perhaps some outside focus and help educating your sales force on what are the care about to those verticals and then tailoring some of the packages.
It could just be in value proposition. Or commercial packaging for those verticals to how to reach them. And then I guess the third right is segmentation and maybe trying to expand out just that incremental step whether, you’ve been in small business and are trying to move up market.
Again, I think the verticalization patch may be a way to, to get there, but it’s take those incremental steps and just slightly higher and not go from a 25 person average customer shop to the thousand is probably too big. But how do you take, 25 to 50 to 100, those sort of incremental steps and certainly get a sense of care about some what it takes to serve different customer segments.
Rich: Is that the kind of thing that you folks help your partners with in the Cisco partner program? It’s part of the education training and so on, how to kind of design, think about, execute that sort of, just as a, for example, a plan to scale.
Ken: I, it really is. I think in our world, Rich, there’s there’s five key roles that we think about within our partner managed focus on a daily basis.
So there’s, Product management. They tend to be a central kind of quarterbacking function within the partner organization service delivery. And what does it take to sitting in the operation center to deliver levels one through three on a 24 by seven basis, sales, marketing and customer success round that out and making sure that the care abouts for each of those roles is well understood and we take that through an engagement model we call our provider success framework.
But that starts with engagement, figuring out where that opportunity is, Erick, that you were just talking about, like, where do you want to grow into? Is it same store sales? Is it different segmentation? Is the new verticals? Once we figure out like what is the definition of success, then from there, we’ll start a formal service creation engagement with them caring for each of those five roles with the key objective there to just getting the provider to market with a new viable surface as quickly as possible and for as least expense.
So if we can bring templates like service descriptions or a view into market pricing or just a social media campaign that could be readily tailored. With unique value proposition, we’re trying to bring something for each of those roles up to the point of launching that service that’s been tested and beta tested and validated through surveys.
And so we know that once it launches, the probability of sales success is super high and then we have lots on the other side of that too, but I’ll pause for a moment there.
Erick: So in terms of today’s post pandemic buyers question that I have for you, Ken and Elizabeth is. What are you seeing in terms of that?
We know that, the pandemic and the lockdown and all that has forced, business customers to think differently and to support their their infrastructures differently. They’re more open to doing co managed IT when in fact, before that MSPs were seen as a threat. I knew there was something I liked about you, Ken, MSP focus, right?
So speaking from your perspective, understanding the MSP methodology or the business model, Elizabeth, you as well, are you seeing a shift in what your MSP partners are now presenting as solutions and services to their end customers that may be different than before the pandemic?
Elisabeth: I think there’s a part here where indeed it just accelerated.
And we are now saying inside Cisco that the MSP motion is like an embedded motion. It’s as important and fast growing compared to resale, which is a big thing to say, because of course, we’ve always been very resale anchored or resale centric, let’s say. So it’s much more of an embedded motion right now.
Which is also why the way we are approaching it is embedded within the partner program, embedded within our seller engagement embedded in everything we do. So that absolutely. And I think it will only continue like that because of what customers are requesting in terms of IT management, right?
I think even what happened last week is a bit of a symptom of that, in a funny way. I agree.
Ken: Yeah, I think that just the overall pace of change coming out of the pandemic has continued to move to such that it’s very difficult in my experience for, corporate I. T. to be able to keep up with the skilling demands to learn the new technologies.
And make sure that they have the, knowledge of the relevant technologies are going to lead to the business transformation that the companies are looking for. It feels to me like that pace of transformation, even outside of the technology range, increase in the expectations on that.
I don’t know whether it’s because we all had more time on our hands for two years, but posts like adjusting to it, [00:45:00] it’s move, move faster, and that certainly hasn’t slowed. Even as people come back to together and. In the office environment and in hybrid environments, but the pace of security threats is certainly increased.
And that’s probably the most obvious area where we see that the need for augmented skill sets because there’s just not enough. And then, we can’t get through a show here without mentioning our two favorite letters of AI. But if you’re gonna, you’re gonna leverage that in the near term, I think it’s probably going to take some outside expertise, not only to design, build, assess what are the possibilities, but to help you maintain that on an ongoing basis.
Rich: And talk about an opportunity for security and networking, right? Both of those are very important elements of AI. In, in addition to co hosting this podcast, a little bit I write a blog about the SMB channel. This is actually the first time. Or first chance I’ve had to speak with you since you stepped into this role you’re in now, which you haven’t been in all that long as as I understand it, but it’s long enough that now is probably the time where you’re beginning to refine, shape revise the partner program a little bit.
Bring me up to speed on where things are with the partner program, maybe some key milestones in the last year, and just what you’re looking at going forward.
Elisabeth: No, absolutely. So even though I’m new in the, in this role, I’ve been working in and with the channel for many years at Cisco.
And actually the last year I was part of a focus transformation effort. And we, one of the big things we were working on was Simplifying and aligning our partner incentives. So we basically replaced three flagship incentives by a single integrated one. And I think we will continue on this journey of making sure we continue to simplify and make it easier for our partners to do business with us.
So that’s a big deal, but I think also everything we discussed in this show like making sure we are designing in for. MSP, but also for other business models whether it’s non transacting. Consulting engagements, advisors, developers, ISV, co selling, et cetera. We have obviously over the year and invested in that, but it’s not properly designed in.
So we are looking at at doing that as well. And I think the final big piece, which was a little bit of a theme in this discussion too, is that. Is the fast changing technology environment and making sure that we are doubling down on enabling and equipping our partners with technical capabilities. So that’s a big topic for us as well.
Rich: Actually, can you maybe speak a little bit more to that the realigned incentives or the unified incentives there? Just so I and folks in the audience understand that a little bit better.
Ken: Elizabeth you’re much closer to that piece of fuel.
Elisabeth: Yeah, I can. So basically we have three main incentives.
One is. We’re proud of it, right? More than 22 years old. Imagine that, which was all about landing landing hardware mostly. And then we had a services incentive as well, which was all about attaching and renewing services. And then finally we had an lifecycle incentive. So we are basically announced last year that we’re integrating and replacing those three by a single one, which is compensating along the life cycle from landing.
To adopting to renewing and for all partner types. And the big deal here is also we are using the same metrics. And the same data and the same visibility at the transaction and customer level for our sellers as for our partners. So back to the point I made before, I think there’s a whole push at Cisco to making sure that we have a true joint go to market between our partner sales force and our own sales force, because our own sales force is also going through a huge transformation.
And so I think that’s really important for us so that as we are working together on deals with. Customers that, that alignment between our partners and our sellers is super tight.
Rich: One last question I’ve got to ask earlier on in the show Erick was providing his tip of the week and he was providing some advice for the MSPs in our audience on managing remote employees, people who are working exclusively or much of the time from home.
And how do you stay in touch with them? How do you make them feel connected? With the company and with each other and one of the things that came up is he talked a little bit about the role that video conferencing tools can play in that and WebEx came up earlier on the conversation and it just popped into my head that there are probably.
Use cases for WebEx in particular, like that, that are maybe not top of mind for MSPs. It’s one thing to offer WebEx to your clients. It’s another to offer it in the context of very specific business pains, business needs, business opportunities that could potentially help you address. I, are there uses for WebEx out there that maybe your partners really should be looking at a little bit more closely?
Ken: Completely. I think that I would say it’s second to none in the industry in terms of. Of [00:50:00] core capabilities of the overall Webex platform the AI that’s integrated within the platform to, to remove background noises and babies crying and people talking and things of that nature is fantastic.
It just as someone who spends most of my waking hours on it, I can say it’s it is a great experience. And that’s complimented, I think, by the messaging platform that can easily elevate. Textual communications to video based calls, whether it’s one to one or one to many at the same time, you’re doing your standard schedule based call.
So between dial tone and I am and rich multimodal media. I think it’s a fantastic platform. And we also appreciate that that it’s made better by great kind of endpoint devices that go on there. If you want to use a laptop webcam in a monitor, that’s great. If you want to use a dedicated device for super high fidelity audio and video, we have that as well.
And that also complements well with other platforms out there like Google meet and Microsoft teams there as well to make those platforms even better experiences. But there’s certainly a great managed opportunity around that. I will say that our our Webex endpoint devices have the thousand eyes endpoints in there that allow for that sort of end to end assessment of the quality of calls.
I think that’s one of our key differentiators is. So when you talk about that remote user base how’s that experience for them going on a daily basis? Are they having choppy calls with blurred audio or blurred video and choppy audio? Or is it coming through in that the quality that’s. Equivalent to, maybe being in the office next door.
Erick: Yeah, we don’t have any experience with having to turn off our cameras and any of that just to overcome choppy, laggy video at all. Never heard of that, Ken.
Rich: Elizabeth, Ken, thank you so much for joining us here on the show. We really appreciate it. We’d love to have you back on at some point down the road. Elizabeth, for folks in the audience who would like to follow up, learn more about you, maybe get in touch. Where should they go?
Elisabeth: Both Ken and I are available at our email addresses, we can share it with you.
And we have on the incentive itself, we have actually a link for folks to go to if they want to know more. So we can share that with you after the show, so you can share it with the folks listening to us.
Rich: Fantastic. We will put that in the show notes, folks for you to find. And Ken any further advice for the audience in terms of getting in touch with you?
Absolutely.
Ken: You can certainly find me on LinkedIn is probably the easiest. Cisco. com slash go partner managed. Is an easy way to do that. We’ll include that hopefully in the show notes as well. Feel free to reach out to me directly. I’m happy to engage if you are not familiar with with Cisco’s capabilities around partner managed services, I highly encourage you to look.
I think we have a second to none portfolio and not only that, but the capabilities to, to earn that preference from you on a day to day basis.
Rich: All right. Fantastic. Thank you both again for joining us on the show. Folks, Erick and I are going to take a quick break right now. When we come back on the other side, we will chat a little bit about the conversation we just had with Elizabeth and Ken from Cisco.
Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We. We’ll be right back
All right, welcome back to part three of this episode of the msp chat podcast once again, we thank our guests from cisco there’s a lot actually for us to chew over. There are but the thing I really want to underscore because this was something that really came home to me when I attended that Cisco partner event last year is they’re not kidding around when they talk about being serious about partnering with with MSPs.
And we got a lot of that in this conversation here, and I got a lot of it at that event as well. And there’s plenty of people. Straight on the main stage, multiple speakers talking about it right up to and including Chuck Robbins, the CEO, you just really felt it and the reason why I think came up in this conversation here, which is just that the, most profitable, fastest growing partners, the ones that Cisco is particularly interested in are the ones with recurring revenue, project revenue is great.
They I’m sure are making. Most of their money that way, but they have learned, as, as many in the industry have just how appealing it is to have that recurring revenue stream come in and MSPs are how you get that.
Erick: You’re right, rich. Not for nothing, but MSPs are the are becoming more and more the ideal earner prospect for.
Technology vendors. And it’s simply because they own the trust and confidence of their clients. They have, they are business, almost business partners. It’s not like a technology reseller vendor or just another one of those vendors. Jay McVean talks about the seven crucial relationships that every business owner keeps, we had them on the podcast and he talked about it and the MSP is becoming [00:55:00] one of those seven.
And it’s because of that ownership and that, integration with business needs and business outcomes that sometimes rich transcend the technology. I’ve talked on the show before about, how, what the maturity level looks like or an IT provider maturing into a managed service provider and being even more strategic, initially.
This happened to me in my MSP, started off selling technology outcomes and technology solutions. And over time through that, understanding and maturing myself and increasing the operational maturity level of our business began selling, from technology outcomes to maybe business departmental outcomes, like taking care of business units within an organization, the accounting, HR, the sales team, and then ultimately business outcomes.
There’s a lot of growth in that life in that client relationship, when you’re looking at that and at that way, because now you’re delivering solutions that impact the overall growth of that organization, keeping it secure, access accessible, data protection, connectivity, collaboration, we just heard with with Elizabeth and Ken, and this is what MSPs are known for and why more and more businesses are engaging with them.
And, I asked the question rich during the interview about the changing needs of businesses since the pandemic. And we know from data and analysis and surveys that more and more MSPs. We’re able to break through that co managed IT barrier that existed before the pandemic.
And we’re not seeing so much as threats, but, as a welcome savior to help these internal IT departments manage these, distributed hybrid or remote workforces now and the security and all of that. Yeah, it’s I have no question in my mind, why, They’re so attractive to technology vendors and to business owners today.
Rich: And just to reinforce a piece of what you said right there. Just remember folks, people, businesses can buy their hardware, their software, anywhere. Solutions and business outcomes are sticky. So that is really what you want to be talking about and offering to your clients. All right.
Thank you again to Cisco. Folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing. It comes to us from Niagara Falls, New York, where not too long ago a woman worked walked into an animal shelter with six parakeets that she just couldn’t take care of any longer and she asked the folks in the shelter, take care of these birds, find good homes for them, which the shelter of course agreed to do.
One of those parrots is named Pepper, and Pepper is a talking parrot, and, by golly I cannot repeat on this podcast the first words to come out of Pepper’s mouth. I’ll give you a slightly abbreviated version. The first thing they heard Pepper say was actually a question. Do you want me to kick your bleep?
And this was not the only thing along those lines, apparently, Pepper knew how to say. Pepper is A bit of a potty mouthed parrot. Now, they went out, this, probably not a fit for every home, but they figured there’s gotta be a home where Pepper is a fit. And they went online and kinda told folks what Pepper is all about.
And by golly, they got 400 applications from people who wanted to adopt Pepper. And they, they did, in fact choose a woman in Olean, New York and her fiancé has Pepper’s new home in part because, believe it or not, this couple had already had an African grey parrot, another very clever talking parrot, who was potty mouthed, and they figure, perfect, they can talk to each other, this is gonna work out, and all’s well that ends well Pepper the potty mouthed parrot has found a new home with with loving human companions and another potty mouthed bird to speak with.
Erick: Rich, stay tuned for the TikTok channel. I can’t wait to watch these two parrots going at it. It’s got to be hilarious.
Rich: But I hadn’t even thought of it. We’ve got to go look it up because I sure hope the video was out there folks we are out of time this week. Thank you so much for joining us on the show We’re going to be back again, another week with another episode for you until then I will just remind you This is both an audio and a video podcast, which means if you are listening to the audio version of the show You’re curious to check us out on video go to youtube look up msp chat You’ll find us there if you’re watching us on youtube But you sometimes listen to audio podcasts to go Spotify, you name it wherever it is, you get your audio podcast.
You’re going to find us there as well. However you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. We appreciate it. It’s going to help other people like yourself find and enjoy the show. The [01:00:00] show is produced by the great Russ Johns. He’s part of a team with us here at Channel Master. He would be happy. To make a podcast like this for you and your company.
And there are all sorts of wonderful things we would love to talk about doing with you at Channel Mastered. You can learn more about us at www. channelmastered. com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered, where Erick works directly with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business.
You can learn more about that company. at www. mspmastered. com. So once again, thank you for joining us on the show. We’ll see you in a week. Until then, please remember, you can’t spell channel without M S P.
