I often ask the vendors I talk to a simple question: How many people within a specific partner’s ecosystem do you think you have enabled? Interestingly, not a single vendor I have ever asked has been able to give me a straight answer. A quizzical look is often follow-up by a guess, which is surprisingly far off from the truth—a point I will come back to later.
Now keep in mind that I have tried this with small, medium, and even large vendors—most of whom are high tech companies who literally spend billions on their ecosystems.
In getting to the bottom of this ecosystem conundrum, it helps break my question down to three core elements: specific partners, their ecosystem, and their enablement. Let’s look at each in more detail.
The partner-specific part of the question is interesting because it attempts to draw out the degree with which the vendor is engaged within the partner (aka footprint). In one case, the head of a partner network told me that he thought they had hundreds of people from that partner engaged with their portal. The partner themselves reported back a few dozen “tops.” Which one is it, and why the discrepancy? From a vendor perspective, it’s usually based on some metric like certifications. But what about all who have never gotten certified? As for the partner’s numbers, in many cases, their people access the vendor’s resources using their own personal credentials, not the company’s (e.g., LinkedIn or Gmail account), which means the partner is fully blind to their enablement activity with the vendor.
The second part of the question is about the partner’s ecosystem, which is very different from that of the vendor. Sure, their two ecosystems meet by their mere relationship, but can the vendor ever know the scope of reach of that partner’s overall ecosystem? The answer is hardly ever. For example, we had a major ISV who was working with us to complain about one of their distributors because they were not sharing the activity of their downstream ecosystem of VAR partners, numbering in the thousands. They were reliant on a distributor for enablement and funding it but had no visibility whatsoever.
The third part of the question is about enablement. Unlike CRM or billing, both of which carry some highly sensitive data and processes that partners may want to protect, enablement per se is generally a win-win for everyone that doesn’t threaten as much. So why not have more openness connectivity? The answer that we found here is primarily due to technological deficiencies in the enablement systems between vendor and partner, which are generally proprietary and placed behind unnecessary moats, not designed to provide seamless connectivity. The good news here is that some larger organizations like Microsoft and Salesforce are finally trying to usher in more openness. However, this is still fairly uncommon in the rest of the industry.
Coming back to the question I originally asked, can it ever be answered? The simple answer is yes, IF vendors and partners are more tightly interconnected. The follow-up would be what technologies would be needed to reach more accurate engagement numbers? The answer is ecosystem networks like TIDWIT that allow end-to-end connectivity, collaboration, and visibility.
For example, imagine if a vendor decides to launch an enablement campaign with one of their large GSI partners. Today they just pass on the links or the bits of content and hope for the best. But what if the vendor could systematically launch the campaign TOGETHER with their partner getting real-time visibility of the entire process. What if the partner didn’t have to do all the campaign work from scratch but rather seamlessly picked up the campaign from their vendor ecosystems and launched it seamlessly to their community on theirs? What if they could protect their user identities and PII, while simultaneously sharing overall metrics with their vendor? What if both organizations had real-time visibility that they could collaborate on more effectively?
In such a scenario as in others, would it be possible for the vendor and their partner to have a precise answer to my question? Absolutely! In fact, all it takes is for them to spin up their mobile phone to access program and campaign analytics, scroll down to the partner to see exactly how many users have been engaged, registered, certified, or whatever other forms of enablement—all in real-time!
This is not a pipe dream; it is exactly how TIDWIT is empowering our ecosystems network participant organizations. The results have been eye-opening. We have found that engagement levels have been significantly underestimated while the interconnectivity boosted enablement by a whopping factor of EIGHT TIMES their highest original estimates! In one case, a partner believed they could reach a maximum of 5,000 engineers at a single GSI, engaging half of them. They ended up reaching more than 40,000 of them. In another case, a campaign was launched to 25,000 and ended being boosted to 36,000!
This is more than just meeting enablement KPIs…This is about driving true transformation. In today’s fast-moving and competitive IT industry, what vendors may not know about their ecosystems might be hurting them.
