Being pleasantly surprised by the number of reactions to my previous blog on the need to improve the ecosystem experience when it comes to enablement, I want to share some additional thoughts.
Most reactions I received were about my remark on moving from art to science.
The difference between art and science in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) became clear to me when I moved from Microsoft to Salesforce in 2013. CRM was an art at Microsoft and it is a science at Salesforce.
When I was asked by the Salesforce EMEA Management team about the timing of closing a particular deal at Shell, my response was: “somewhere in Q4 I guess”. I still remember the look on their faces, not sure whether I was making a bad joke or indeed was clueless. I soon realized it was the latter when asked, “I actually need the day of close.”
Forecasting in Salesforce is a science with exact, strict timelines and checkpoints, supported by innovative and excellent technology to support all processes along the way. Everything is measured, analyzed and discussed in detail, every day. Being slightly off on a forecast is considered a sin. That is science.
At Microsoft, CRM was an art. As a consequence, at Microsoft we were hopeless in accurately forecasting sales. Fortunately, we always had more revenue coming in than we expected. I still remember my first Sales meeting in 1997 with our sales manager asking the question “we still have $1 Million unaccounted for, which companies shall we assign this to in our systems?”
My move to Salesforce made me think a lot about the difference between art and science, more importantly it made me think about the resistance to change in moving from art to science, not only within the organization itself but across the ecosystem as a whole.
At Microsoft sales we loved the freedom and creativity that comes with art. A sales course? Nah.. you don’t need to teach a monkey how to climb! A sales plan? Nah… a lion does not have a plan for hunting, it is all instinct and the right responses. The technology we loved to use was PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. Now I realize these are creative tools that belong to art. We used our subjective interpretation of what we thought would happen in the future based on our “experience” and
“instincts”.
At Salesforce the CRM technology supports the sales process step by step, with no room for creativity, little room for error or interpretation. Sales is tightly integrated with marketing, finance, products and fulfillment. The technology is fit for purpose for sales and forecasting, yet not many salespeople like this lack of freedom.
My experience is that most organizations tend to prefer art until they realize the power of science in not necessarily fully replacing but boosting their art.
A similar transformation is now happening as ecosystems become larger and more complex, with the art of ecosystem management now becoming a science.
The times we joked about the go-kart or golfing skills of our Partner Account Managers is far behind us now. Alliance management is no longer “the role you take just before retiring”, instead becoming a strategic imperative that helps an organization, compete and thrive.
It is no surprise that Jay McBain, Principal Analyst, Channel Partnerships & Alliances at Forester Research, published the first Channel Software Tech Stack in 2020, and released the second just this week.
The channel tech stack includes technologies to support the many processes now involved in eco system management, including finding, recruiting, onboarding, developing, enabling, incentivizing, and increasingly enablement, which includes training, certification, co-selling, co-marketing, and so many more other workloads–all meant to scientifically measure, report, and boost partnerships.
Looking at the many logos in the tech stack, including my current company TIDWIT, reminds me of other tech stacks at the beginning of transitions to scientific approaches. Technology to more adequately support ecosystem management is emerging rapidly and over time will consolidate to a few household names.
Despite having been a bit harsh in this blog on the forecasting skills of Microsoft in their early days, I do believe Microsoft remains a leader in channel management and there is a happy ending to this story.
At TIDWIT we have been working with the Microsoft Channel team to improve the channel enablement experience by making access to Microsoft content seamless and easy discoverable. In addition, by continuously improving detailed day to day reporting we are contributing a more scientific approach in that historically art-oriented culture. The process has led to unprecedented scaling of dynamic enablement.
TIDWIT is helping Microsoft and some of its key partners turn ecosystem strategy from an art to a data-driven science, boosting enablement by a whopping 800% in footprint while providing dynamic updates that save time and resources and real time metrics that allow for better support and decision making.
The hard question for ecosystem managers in setting strategies going forward is: Can you afford to sit on bench and enjoy the art that is your ecosystem, or does the market now compel you to switch to the science of ecosystems? TIDWIT customers are resoundingly proving the latter to us every day.
