34 - Hiring A Fractional Channel Chief vs. In-House - Kameron Olsen

Paul Bird: You often hear of a fractional CMO or a fractional, but its not so often you come across a fractional channel chief. How does that even work? And what are the advantages and disadvantages for a role for you as a channel chief? And what are the advantages and disadvantages for the role as the vendor wondering if they should hire a fractional channel chief? Well discuss this and a lot more in this episode today. As usual, feel free to follow along with the transcript and easily replay a section with our chapter markers. Our guest today has been in the channel space for more than 15 years. His expertise includes technology service, distributor partnerships, and unified communications as a service as UCAAS at Telarus, he headed up the UCAAS practice and they described him as an absolute all star in the UCAAS industry. And most recently he's ventured out on his own as a fractional channel chief. Specifically, he helps suppliers find success in the channel by working with tsds and partners. He's here today with us to talk about why you want to consider hiring a fractional channel chief versus in house. Please welcome Kameron Olsen. Welcome to the show, Kameron. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Kameron Olsen: Thanks Paul, appreciate you having me on your podcast. Excited to be part of this.

Paul Bird: Glad to have you here. So tell us a little bit about some of the highlights in your career in the channel so far.

Kameron Olsen: Yeah, I think the highlights started probably early on in my career when I joined an organization selling prem based phone systems. The owner took me under his wing and taught me, kind of taught me everything he knew. And then he came to me as asked me if I wanted to be a partner of his to build a UCAAS practice. And so we went from Prem based to selling host. It was called hosted VoIP back then, right, building a UCAAS practice and right over the freeway from us, was a couple gentlemen and they owned a company called Telarus and they came after and asked us to start selling our product through this channel. And so very early on in my career, as I ventured into building an organization, the channel came very quickly. And so, you know, about ten plus years ago, God, it's been longer than that now. Probably twelve years ago, the channel kind of got introduced to me, spent a long time doing that, you know, figuring out bumps, scrapes, bruises, cuts of bumping around in the channel, trying to find success. But I think where it really came into play is when I joined Telaris and joined the TSD and spent a couple years understanding, really how the channel works and realizing, man, there's a lot of people out there who are struggling trying to figure it out for sure.

Paul Bird: As soon as you said on prem phone systems, I'm like, I just had a flashback. It's like the Nortel option eleven C PBX. I think I just did. So what led you to specialize in fractional channel leadership?

Kameron Olsen: The idea kind of started as when I was with telaris and I sat through hundreds and hundreds of supplier demos and conversations, I started to realize that what we had built at my UC practice was a little special. We really focused on kind of that franchise type model business building strategy, right. That we had systems and structures to everything we do. And I realized the rest of the world wasn't built that way, right. We would have these suppliers and stuff come on these calls, and there was a lot of mess out there. People were confused. They didn't know what to do. And so I figured, as the amount of suppliers are increasing in the channel, right. Ten years ago, there was 50, like these TSD had 50 suppliers in their ecosystem. Now they're bumping into that four to 500 range.

Paul Bird: Yeah.

Kameron Olsen: That there are a lot of people who need structure, and they're trying to figure out this channel and don't know how to do it.

Paul Bird: So can you explain the concept between a fractional channel chief and how that would differ from having an in house channel leader?

Kameron Olsen: It's not that different, really. The goal of a channel chief is helping, putting together a channel program, a structured program. Right now, with the amount of suppliers coming into this space, there's not enough channel chiefs out there. Tsds are turning around 20 to 30 suppliers a month, saying, hey, go build a channel program, and then come back. There's not enough people with experience out there these days to even have the ability to hire a channel chief. All the people with tribal knowledge are being asked to do some of this. But if you decided you wanted to be a channel chief, there's nowhere you can go to get that education, there's nowhere you can go to see best practices. And so you have to hire somebody, and there's just not enough people. So you can go out and you can spend the four or $500,000 on target earnings and all that type of stuff, or you can hire somebody at the fractional rate who has had all the experience gone through the learning curve, has some structure, understands the system, more importantly, has the relationships with the people that are needed and hired them with 20 hours of work, and they can accomplish more in a month than somebody who can do it full time that doesn't have any of that experience or relationships, for sure.

Paul Bird: And you have to have those battle scars. Right. What's the typical responsibilities and kind of scope of work in a fractional channel chief role? I guess it's kind of the same as an in house. But what's kind of your typical responsibilities in the scope of your work?

Kameron Olsen: When somebody asks us to come in and help them, it's usually we get two different variations of suppliers. The first supplier is somebody that says, hey, I have no channel program at all. And I hear that this is the new and upcoming way. You hear a. Around 75% of all technology is consumed through an indirect model or through a partner. And so they're saying, hey, we want to build out a channel program. We have no place. We don't understand it. We don't know how to do it. Can you teach us how? So that's kind of one method. The other method that we typically find are people who are in the channel. And due to the complexities and the changing of the current systems and the dynamics of the current channel, suppliers are struggling, finding success. So they're coming to us and they're asking us, hey, how do we do this now? What is the new system? What is the new structure? Help us look at everything and help us redesign to help us find success. Typically the first thing we do is we'll come in and look at their current processes. Right? Do they have the things we'll do, a basic gap analysis of? Here's what it should be like, here's what you have, and let's build towards it. The problem is, is once again, there's no formal education out there. There is no how to book on the channel. Specifically in the channel, we play that telco side, not to be confused with kind of that disti, the Disney side. But in the telco channel, there's no how to guide anywhere. You can't go to anywhere that has that. So at the channel advisors, we've built out a franchise type model of a go to market strategy in the channel. So we sit down and say, this is what you need. What do you have? And then, and let's begin to build. Create the processes and build the reporting and start watching the metrics and just making sure we're going through the playbook.

Paul Bird: So what do you enjoy the most about your role as a fractional channel chief as opposed to being full time with an organization?

Kameron Olsen: I love to build. I love to create. I love to just, have new projects over and over again. And although our clients typically stick around for an extended period of time, we've only been doing this a year. I just wrapped up one contract, and it was a year long contract with a supplier, have a couple more that are still going on. It feels like it's new every day. Right? It's helping suppliers find success. But I think more personally, the better thing is there's a lot of channel managers out there that just don't know how to do this. They're jumping from job to job to job, ramping up on quota, struggling, trying to figure it out, and then moving on because they couldn't hit the quota. Right. I think what I enjoy most about this is teaching people the right metrics, the right activities, and the things to do so that they can find success. They can figure out how to stay in this place and provide an income for their family or whatever their dreams are for their future.

Paul Bird: So how do you navigate potential conflicts of interest or competing priorities when working with multiple clients?

Kameron Olsen: Yeah, for the most part, between me and my business partner and some of our other advisors, we typically separate the businesses. So if we have two wireless providers, I'll take one, and then my business partner will take the other. But really, what we try to focus on is just building out the structure together and allowing each individual consultant work with that particular supplier to put the secret sauce in the process.

Paul Bird: Are there situations where it's more advantageous to have an in house employee, as opposed to an outsourced fractional channel chief managing your growth?

Kameron Olsen: Here's, I think, the difference between being a full time employee and being a consultant. My time is spent more time educating and training than actually doing. I come in and I tell the leaders of the organization, your CRM needs to be set up differently. Here's a document, and here's your sales process, and here's everything in a format that you need to run. And then I let them build it. It's much more about training them, how the channel works, what the channel looks like, how, the important pieces of it versus sitting down and actually doing. If you had $400,000, $500,000 to hire an experienced channel chief, that could give you 40 hours a week, then, yeah, go that direction. I think you'll probably find a little more benefit from having an in house guy. I don't know if you're going to be able to find that out there. If you have a bunch of money to burn through and spent your maybe hire a full time person, but I don't think suppliers have that kind of cash. And, most of the people coming into the channel want to do a try before they buy scenario they want to see. And the first part of channel motions is a little bit of a discovery, right. You need to go figure out what makes you different. You need to figure out really where you play. I think what I find with most of my clients when they come in and they say, what makes you special and what makes you different? We go bounce that in the channel and all of the trusted advisors out there will say, no, you don't play in that space, or, no, you're not really unique there. And so there's a little bit of a learning curve to even get into the channel. And so sometimes that just needs a little bit of time and we really will help them do that.

Paul Bird: So when I was getting into managing now, I was right at the cusp of, tech and telecom when I started managing channel. And I was basically thrown in headfirst. And it was essentially, you know, figure it, figure it out for yourself now. We did end up growing the business, which was fantastic. I got on the road, I basically, we had probably around 400 different resellers right throughout the US. So I used Microsoft streets and trips, if that starts to date me. And I plugged in every reseller I had between Boston and Miami. And it was about 55, 56 resellers I could say how long I wanted to drive, how many stops a day I would make. So I spent three weeks visiting 55 people all the way down the east coast. And it was to get an understanding of how they ran their business, what was important to them, what were they focusing on? When I have a, Citrix reseller that's using our platform versus somebody that's doing CTI work, computer telephony integration. When I have leads, I'm going to send the right opportunities to the right partners or people that were simply, this is just not our core business, so I'm not going to really depend on them. And that was the foundation for what it took for me to really grow the business, was understanding the partners I was working with, because it wasn't just one type of partner, it wasn't just integrators that were working with our solutions. It wasn't just people working on the telephony integration, or it was really across the board, even specialty, where we had, you know, insurance companies that were doing specialized programs for insurance companies and brokers. So that was the secret, was to make sure. I had an in depth understanding of how they ran the business and what.

Kameron Olsen: Was important to them. Did you have anybody, as you learned how to do that, teach you how to do that? Did you have any formal training on how to work the channel?

Paul Bird: No, not at all. It was basically here, we've now acquired this software company out of New Jersey. They have a channel you're no longer selling directly. So here are the territory that you have now on the east coast. Go figure it out.

Kameron Olsen: Yeah, it's interesting. I put a poll on LinkedIn the other day, and out of 125 channel managers, three of them claim to have some sort of training within their organization. It boggles my mind. The suppliers who go out and they hire a channel manager who you can tell through their LinkedIn profile, has struggled in their last two or three or four different employments. And they hire these people thinking that something's going to be changed, something's going to be different here. We're different. We're going to help these people. We have a better product, and they continue to struggle, and nobody is providing any sort of education and training on how to do this. It boggles my mind.

Paul Bird: Yeah, well, and then I had to train our own people as I was gradually promoted through the organization. So what advice would you give to a company that was considering hiring a fractional channel chief for the first time, and what steps should take to ensure a real successful partnership?

Kameron Olsen: Yeah, I think the first thing that I would ask is understanding the methodology. What's important, how does the channel chief or whoever you're hiring, how do they envision the channel, and how do they find success in the channel? I think the other thing that's scary for most of us is there's such a large flux of change right now, especially in the telecom, but it's the same thing in the MSP and the traditional channel. Private equity has come in. They have recognized that we're undervalued, and they've kind of dipped their toe by providing a bunch of money into our space, doing a bunch of roll ups. And things are changing. Right. Partners and trusted advisors are now becoming TSDs. They're doing supplier contracts, and some of these TSDs are now announcing that they're going out and buying partners and vertically integrating as well. So what has worked in the past most likely doesn't work anymore. I like the phrase, and we've kind of coined the phrase 02:00 a.m., trust. Right. The telco channel has been built on 02:00 a.m., trust, which means, hey, we're going to, as a supplier, we're going to meet at a bar and we're going to talk, and we're going to drink and we're going to get drunk or have a few drinks until 02:00 a.m. Until there's mutual destruction stories that now we can trust each other and we build. 02:00 a.m.. Trust. I think our market is maturing. A lot of the older guard has sold out or part of a roll up. And I think the younger generation, generation of trusted advisor now has their eye on a prize. They've realized that there is now an exit strategy available, to them, which wasn't available before. And they're starting to have conversations with these private equity organizations to see what they want. And what a private equity organization wants is somebody with really good books that they can determine what their evaluation is and how long their customers have been using these services and all that type of stuff. And as I go around and talk to more of these trusted advisors, I'm hearing more and more of them building solid business practices. What does that really mean? What that means is the suppliers need to mature along with them. It's no longer about just taking them out to golf, it's no longer about 02:00 a.m. Trust and drinking late. It's about providing real value back into the ecosystem to these trusted advisors. And it's about, hey, how do we help them find more opportunities? How do we convert the customers they have today to selling those additional services that are new in the tel channel, the cloud and the cybersecurity? And how do we as suppliers help generate more new logos and more revenue for them that they didn't have before? And so, going back to your question, long winded way of, hey, make sure you understand what they believe the future of the channel looks like and really how they should pivot the company in order to maintain what the new vision of the channel is.

Paul Bird: That's interesting. So in addition to bringing in those processes and kind of the gap analysis, what about looking after partner operations and making partner management tech stack recommendations to each vendor? Is that part of your scope as well when it comes to the systems they use, like their tech stack, whether they're using specific systems for being able to do partner marketing or something, to be able to do enablement and opportunity management, do you get involved on that side of it as well and make recommendations? Yeah, we do.

Kameron Olsen: In fact, we come in and we help what we find with most of these suppliers is that they struggle and they don't know how to talk to the partner community. Most of the engagements that we get brought into, when you ask them, hey, pretend like I'm a trusted advisor or a partner and present to me your company like you would. What we find is all they can do is they can talk to me like an end user. Right. Partners don't really care about the technology. They do in the fact that, hey, what problems do we solve? But it's so much bigger than that. It's, hey, what is your sales team look like? If I bring you an opportunity that I have comfort and confidence that you're going to be able to handle a sales process. What does your implementation team look like? What does your support look like? Hey, are you paying me fair compensation for bringing you opportunities? What are your sales enablement tools look like? So I think there's a lot of myths within the supplier community in just that. Like, hey, how and what tools do you have to help those suppliers be successful and a partner portal and self marketing tools and those types of things, I think are not getting their due share or their fair share of recognition of what is needed to continue to grow the channel.

Paul Bird: When you look at working with different clients, when you look at their tech stack on how they're managing their partnerships, do they vary from vendor to vendor, or, you know, do you do kind of analysis of, here's what you're at this stage, these are the best tools for you to use. You're at this stage, here's a different set of tools to use. Do you kind of bury your approach to that or does it not get that deep?

Kameron Olsen: No, it does. Absolutely. And we require, as part of our gap analysis, they have particular tools. You would be shocked in the number of suppliers out there who don't even have a CRM that they're managing their relationships off of spreadsheets. It boggles my mind to see that an organization the size that they are still working out of spreadsheets, the fact that they don't have a tried and true CRM is crazy to me.

Paul Bird: What year is this? If you're going to be doing it on spreadsheets, it better be excel, because I'm pretty sure my, copy of Lotus 123 is not going to run on anything anymore.

Kameron Olsen: Yeah, because, look, simple things are needed. All suppliers are good at tracking opportunity from a deal level, right? Your standard sales pipeline, how many deals did you get access to quoting and how many of them are in different stages? And what is your conversion rates and all that type of stuff. What you don't see, and I think where a lot of channel people go wrong, is they don't track their engagement with their partners to the same degree of specific, really granular, specific details. So how many partners did you get introduced to at the event that you paid for the golf event or the happy hour or whatever? How many did you meet there from that? How many did you call later on and they took your phone call? Just, a, back and forth conversation. Conversation to a discovery call. Discovery call to your supplier, presentation. Presentation to quotes and quotes to closes. No wonder we can't track an ROI from our MDF dollars in the money we spend to go host all of these events, because nobody's tracking the engagements with a partner. If I'm a channel manager and I go to this golf event, and I can take a bunch of partners from conversation to Discovery call, but I can't get any of the partners from Discovery call to give me an opportunity to quote. But my counterpart over here is not really good at talking to people. But everybody does. A discovery call gets a quote out of, hey, you got to know some of that stuff. What are they doing that the other one's not doing? And let's look at the systems and what makes them special, and let's marry their best practices up to create a real, true process that could help the partner succeed in your ecosystem.

Paul Bird: That's a great, answer, because you talk about taking partners out to golf or taking them out to something like that. When you look at it from the experience that you want to provide partners, that whole experience with any one vendor, is there things that you do to track that so you can make sure that that partner is having kind of an optimized, smooth relationship with the vendor that you're working with? Sure.

Kameron Olsen: I think, first of all, is trying to level set on your engagement, right? A discovery call. Most people just bypass the discovery call. They throw up on them, everything they do as a supplier and say, hey, when you find an opportunity, give me a call. I think the more mature suppliers are going to sit down with a partner or trust advisor and say, hey, where are you at today? What do you sell? Where are you at? Where are your verticals? Where are you finding success? What technologies are you selling? And then where do you want to go? Sometimes they have answers to that, and sometimes they don't. So you have to build a vision of, if they know nothing about cybersecurity, it's going to be, where are you at today? And I say, hey, I sell Uc and I sell physical security. Maybe I'm in the cannabis industry and I come in and I help the cannabis industry with compliance. It's like, all right, so where do you want to go? They're like, I don't know. We just want to help these cannabis companies. We're finding lots of success selling these things. Do you want to sell cybersecurity? Yes, we would love to. We don't know how. We've never experienced it. We don't even know how to ask the questions. The best one ive seen was a supplier mine, vertex, sat down with that partner and said, hey, youre selling physical security. What are the issues with physical security? And he says, hey, if the camera goes out and you cant see that camera working, theres major fines and there are major issues. And, this cybersecurity company, whos an MdR provider, says, thats great. Were going to integrate with the physical security system. We see that they have an integration. We're going to watch for alarms and triggers, and then we're going to do and create trouble tickets for when that's down. And then it's just a natural pull through conversation, them going from a physical security conversation, moving them right into cybersecurity, and something that they're just naturally aware of in their sales processes. So now they can start selling cybersecurity because they're selling physical security.

Paul Bird: Interesting approach. So how do you stay up to date on industry trends and these best practices in kind of channel sales management?

Kameron Olsen: Lots of webinars, lots of discussions. Like right now, I'm actually at one of Telarus ascends, where they're talking about cybersecurity and cloud. So they're training the partners on how to have these conversations and how to sell into these verticals. So we do a lot of that. And then I have lots of friends around the industry that are in all sorts of verticals and just stay up to date and having conversations and then listening to podcasts like yours.

Paul Bird: well, thanks for listening. Do you think that working with multiple vendors at once gives you deeper insight into trends and whatnot?

Kameron Olsen: Yes, 100%. Because I think as an organization and you are focused on one thing, you can build a lot of biases, right? You can get stuck going down a road because you have this idea or this thought or this trend, and you get stuck in this rut and you can't figure it out because of all the biases of being, kind of stuck in between two walls. But as I start to work with multiple organizations, and I start talking and seeing different ways people are doing things and bringing best practices together, it gives me a wider scope. We are in the process of putting some of the final touches on some advisory boards. We have a channel manager advisory board where we went out and we invited some of the top channel managers in the industry to come in and sit down once a week to talk about where they find success, what sales motions they do, where their gaps are, what they're struggling with. And we're crowd sourcing the first ever industry best practices. So we're doing that across channel managers, we're doing that across channel chiefs, and we're also in the process of getting together some of the top industry leaders to talk about best practices across the different facets of the ecosystem.

Paul Bird: That's a great idea. So as we start to wrap up, can you share any insights or tips for vendors who are building nurturing successful channel partnerships in today's really competitive landscape?

Kameron Olsen: I think it's a couple things. Spend some time understanding, really what makes you special. The buying Persona exercise is so important in this space. What you think makes you special because you've closed a couple deals may not make you that special in the channel because you already have some competition. So know where you play and where you really stand out. And then I think the other thing is make sure your systems are super structured, that you have the processes written out and you're tracking the right metrics for your team to go out and find success and then train. Train them how to do it. Don't allow them to go run out and struggle trying to figure it out on their own. Give them the help. Give them the education and training. Be that organization for them that helps them find success.

Paul Bird: So any advice that you would give to vendors who may be considering hiring a fractional channel chief and what they should look for in a candidate?

Kameron Olsen: Somebody with experience, somebody who's been there, done that, somebody with the relationships that can help move the needle. A lot of the channel is relationship driven, just is people that they know and trust and they have insights in. Yeah, you got to make sure that they have a very structured system, that they know people within the channel and that they've proven themselves to help you get there.

Paul Bird: If you could look into the future, how do you envision the role of a fractional channel chief evolving? And what opportunities do you see for companies that are going to leverage this model in the future?

Kameron Olsen: I think it has to evolve until somebody comes out and we finish building the training program, there's just not enough. I think the amount of suppliers coming into the space, we estimate there's four to 500 now that are quote unquote in the channel. We're estimating in the next two to three years, probably closer to three years, that that number is going to at least triple. There's going to be 1200 suppliers in the telco channel. Specifically, you got to stand out. So they're going to have to find people who can help them get there. And that has had that experience. And when you triple in size, you have to go find a trusted advisor. We're no different than the technology industry, right? The reasons why there are partnerships is because there's not enough employees to hire cisos, there's not enough employees to hire cybersecurity, specialists. That's why everything's being outsourced these days. That's why the MSP industry has been so successful, because companies can't find, hire, employ, and keep enough employees to manage the technology in their space. It's the same thing here. People can't find enough employees to help them build and grow their channel programs. They're needing somebody to come in that specializes in this and has done it time and time and time again. And I think they'll find their biggest success through fractional programs like mine.

Paul Bird: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on our show today, Cameron. It was really great to have you here.

Kameron Olsen: Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it.