209 – 7 Keys to Unlocking “Pinnacle Partner Success” (Even When They Pivot)

Ultimate Partner® Special Join host Vince Menzione as he delves into the essential principles for achieving success in the dynamic partnership landscape, with a special focus on strategies tailored for Microsoft collaborations. In this episode, you’ll discover the transformative power of a growth mindset, leadership principles, and the keys to executing a winning partner strategy. Explore firsthand accounts of partner success with Microsoft, learn about branding essentials, and understand the crucial role of agility in staying ahead in today’s ever-evolving industry. What You’ll Learn  Partnering principles for success in a rapidly changing industry. (0:00) Growth mindset and leadership principles. (2:16) Partner strategy and execution. (6:19) Partner success with Microsoft, branding, and agility. (8:09) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube Announcing Ultimate Partner Experience I am thrilled to welcome you into a world that delivers unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information to unlock your potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals. This is a world crafted for partners like you. Our journey began seven years ago with a vision to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. It started with a podcast. Today, Ultimate Partner’s mission is clear and bold, “empower every individual, organization, and partner to achieve more through successful partnering. As an Ultimate Partner Experience Member, you will unlock a growing treasure trove of resources. Dive into recordings of our events, exclusive podcast episodes, and a wealth of unique content, all designed to enhance your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and ecosystem growth. 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Welcome to the future, Vince Menzione CEO, Ultimate Partner Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS Summary Keywords partner, microsoft, principles, maniacal focus, success, organisation, year, growth mindset, mindset, ultimate guide, grounded, ag, apply, partnership, brand, satya, amazing, internally, work, competing Vince Menzione 0:00 Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And in November of 2023 30, leaders congregated to a packed house of partners to help spark the ecosystem in this time of rapid change and transformation. If you were there in person, you felt the electricity and excitement in the room. But if you couldn’t join us in person, I still wanted to share this incredible rich content with you here. So I hope you enjoy this amazing session, as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you. Vince Menzione 0:44 I am, I feel so grateful and so blessed? For this moment. And I just want to thank all of you for being here for supporting us. I wanted to take a few minutes this morning, before we kick into an amazing conversation just to ground us. And I don’t know how many of you follow along with me on my podcast and my journey. But, you know, I’ve talked about my transformation several years, several years in the business, running partner organisations, both on the partner side, and then almost a decade at Microsoft, and then 200 podcast episodes where I ask every single guest, what do the best do? And when you see failure, what do you wish you had said to those partners that failed partnering with you. And so from that body of knowledge that laboratory, I’ve boiled down a set of operating principles that I believe, make success. And they’re also the ones that lead to failure. And so I just wanted to ground us because I think it’ll, today is about the how, and to get to the how the tactics, we have to start with principles, we have to lead with principles. And so I’m just going to spend a few minutes here talking about a set of operating principles of successful partnering. And I believe there’s seven, you could say, there’s more, there’s less, but I’ve grounded in on what I call the internal victory, and then the partnership victory. And I’m going to discuss each one of these in a few mil. This could be an hour long presentation, and I’m going to do it in about five minutes. How’s that? All right, because I, I’m not gonna and by the way, this was a whole deck and it’s one slide. So I’m kind of proud that we got it down to that. But we talked a little bit about mindset when we started out the day yesterday. And this amazing leader, Satya Nadella who’s probably one of the greatest CEOs, legendary CEOs, at least of my of last decade, maybe even my career history. When Satya, I was I was at Microsoft during the bomber days and then the early Satya days. And the first three things that this gentleman did. He just got a copy of the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, if you haven’t read that book, I think it’s a great read on mindfulness mindset, growth, mindset versus scarcity, limited mindset. And that was a great opportunity for us to get grounded in the principle of growth mindset as an organisation. The second thing he did, and I mentioned this yesterday, the video of Michael Gervais, Michael Gervais, he was instrumental in helping set up the leadership team at Microsoft to move to a growth mindset. You see, these were Alpha leaders who were competing for resources, rewards, and, and recognition. And so those people were fighting and competing, in fact, built by firms competing against each other. And he he’s knocked down all those barriers. Mindset became a principle within Microsoft. And you go, wow, that’s like kind of a woowoo thing like we as leaders in our organisations, and to be successful partnering need to have a growth mindset, your CEO, your C suite, need to get there. And one of the principles we work through with the podcast. And the work that I do is around this and expect to see some more work even with Michael hopefully in the future. But mindfulness and mindset are critical to success while partnering and I believe that’s foundational, it’s a foundational element. And if it’s not there, Vince Menzione 4:15 it’s not going to be you’re not going to reach your pinnacle of success. Vince Menzione 4:20 I’m so excited to continue to partner with ag one. Many of you know I made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens, and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one Vince Menzione 5:00 Get a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five free travel packs with your first purchase, go to drink ag one.com, forward slash Vince M, that’s drink ag one.com forward slash, then m, check them out. The second operating principles are on commitment. I talked about this yesterday, like, we all work in this partnership world. And sometimes we’re siloed. Because our executive teams aren’t necessarily committed. Commitment means a lot of things, it means from the C suite on down to the selling floor, everybody speaks partner, it means that the CFO is committing resources, it means the CMO is in lockstep with you on messaging and go to market. And it means that the selling organisation is selling with, through and CO selling in the partner journey. And so getting there is extremely important to success. The third principle I like to talk about is having a shared vision, and your partnership with Microsoft. I believe that this is fundamental Microsoft works off of this vision concept. And I believe that getting there is critical. It’s not just about the tactics, it’s not just about a situational relationship, it’s about having a long term vision for success and outlining what that looks like. And using that in within your own organisation, to rally people around what you’re trying to do, and how you’re trying to drive the growth of your organisation, and to get your partner on the other side on board. And we do visioning as part of the work that we do. But that’s an important principle, you need to get that down, you need to have a true vision for success. Well, both in terms of your partner strategy internally, as well as with your your key partners. So that’s when you get internal victory, you get it right, internally, you have growth mindset, you have extreme commitment, and you put vision and your values upfront. Vince Menzione 6:55 When you lock arms across the other side, if you notice in the middle of that diagram, mutual trust, if you don’t have trust, you don’t have a partnership. Vince Menzione 7:03 When trust is out of the room, there’s no there’s no oxygen in the room, there’s no partnership. And if you feel it sometimes don’t I mean, you’re in these meetings, and it’s not quite the way it should be. And you know, you’re just doing it, you’re just going through the motions, you have to have true mutual trust, before you lock arms with another organisation. So that’s a principle. It’s actually the oxygen in the room. And then when we move over to the other side, we need to do some things. We need to apply maniacal focus to the execution. You see, when I was a GM at Microsoft, I’d have all these meetings, we’d all get in the room. And we talk about like, yeah, we’re going to do this, we’d have all the slides, we’d say this is what our journey is gonna look like. These are the actions that we’re going to drive, this is our mutual go to market strategy. This is how much sales we’re going to drive. And then we leave Inspire. And I go to my PDM, three months later. So whatever happened to that partner, Vince Menzione 7:56 crickets, we didn’t execute. We didn’t apply maniacal focus, the execution where the best partners, and their former CEO is actually here. Today, I don’t know if I can’t, I can’t see everybody in the room. But they used to come to Microsoft with their book, every year it inspire. And they would have, they basically come to the table and say, This is what we did with you this year. And they’d show us the results. And they did that every day. But at the end of the year, it was palpable that they actually came and they demonstrated, this was your blueprint, this is what you were trying to achieve. This is how we achieved it together, applying maniacal focus to your success. Brand. You know this gentleman, if you were here yesterday, dux Raymond size, a great friend, he’s been on my podcast three or four times now, he does this better than anybody I talked about building your brand. And your brand story. You see, you’ve got to get your marketing really good both with internally and with your you know, to your customers, but your go to market message with the partner. And then the third piece is you need to brand back to Microsoft, you see, you’re trying to be a shiny quarter in a bucket full of shiny quarters, even if you’re a significant partner. And you know, you’re going to do more for Microsoft than anybody else. And you’ve got all these competencies and great solutions, you need to brand yourself. So branding is a critical component. And we’re gonna have a session on that today. So I just want to make sure that we’re all grounded on modern marketing principles and showing up and especially how it aligns to the new world that we live in today. The sixth principle is about delivering results, you say it’s okay to say you’re going to do it, but then you have to go delivered against it. And that’s if you’ve applied maniacal focus, if you’ve done everything you need to do on the go to market side and branding both internally and to your customers and to your partners. You get that flywheel going. That flywheel of success is where you will build momentum and that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. And then you’re applying maniacal focus on it because you’re meeting Vince Menzione 10:00 regularly and discussing it. And every meeting you have with a seller and Microsoft, you’re discussing those success stories. You’re saying this is the slide that says what I liked that partner that showed up with the book, you show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant. Need to do that. And then we’ve done all these things were wildly successful as a Microsoft partner, right? Vince Menzione 10:24 We’ve done everything right. We’re at the pinnacle. We’re a top cosell Partner of the Year. And guess what Microsoft just did? They pivoted. They just changed everything right. They changed their priorities. They changed how they’re compensated in their people. They might have introduced a few things this year, like AI, like marketplace, and this whole new thing around SMC and what do you have to do now? You have to apply agility to your business. You need to be relevant, you need to stay relevant you need to thrive to survive, or you will be marginalised. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to bartering.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate bark. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner Watch on YouTube