Why we need a culture of greater collaboration in the channel

It’s a challenging sales environment today - businesses are looking to cut costs, product categories are shifting all the time, and economic and geopolitical uncertainty can act as a brake on decision-making. In the channel, we’ve responded to this by adopting a transactional mindset - often regarding each other as competitors first, hoarding information, and even adversarial relationships.

This will get us nowhere. In order to get through uncertainty, and make the most of the new growth opportunities on offer, we need a mindset shift in the channel. One that emphasises collaboration over conflict, information sharing and good-faith partnership over zero-sum competition. If we don’t, we will see increasingly strained relationships between partners, leaving us unable to meet the evolving demands of customers - ultimately, everybody loses.

Why we need to change

There are two important shifts that have happened over the past few years that mean our operating model as an industry needs to transform: changing buyers, and changing go to market models.

 Let’s take buyers first. We’ve been living through a significant generational shift in the last few years towards new buyers in B2B technology. According to Forrester, millennial and gen Z now make up 71% of B2B buyers. With this comes different expectations. These buyers have grown up with the internet, and expect to see the same seamless experiences they enjoy in consumer tech be replicated in the B2B world.

 The addressable market in many areas of technology is far larger than one individual vendor can possibly reach. To go to market effectively, vendors now need an ecosystem of partners around them to bring their products to market. And to do this effectively, they need to create a platform, with open standards that others can use to build on. Take Tesla as an example - they open-sourced all their patents a few years ago to do exactly this and built an ecosystem of businesses around their core organisation. This allowed them to get their products and services into the hands of more users by making it easier for third-parties to build with their technology.

How to create a more collaborative culture

End-customers work with many different partners, sometimes ten or more. Yet when we talk about the partner ‘ecosystem’, we’re often really talking about the vendor at the centre, which then hides what partners are and aren’t within their partner program. This isn’t a true ecosystem model - ecosystems in nature don’t have one entity at the centre controlling everything, they’re a decentralised web of different entities within the overall community.

But getting to that type of model is hard work, and it necessarily involves a mindset shift towards a greater degree of collaboration, between vendors and their partners, and between partners themselves, to be able to offer the kinds of solutions and services that our new customers are expecting.

I recently spoke with one of Okta’s partners, Stephen Williams, sales director at Intragen (formerly Atlas Identity), who had some fantastic ideas on how to put this into practice.

Cultural reset requires constant effort

“Our most successful customer deployments have always been ones where we’ve worked with other partners,” says Stephen Williams. “Often a transactional mindset is the default setting, and it’s something that we have to work day and night to push against.”

“It’s a cultural and mindset shift, and something that needs to be nurtured constantly - you have new people coming and going on teams all the time, it needs ongoing effort. For example, setting up quarterly calls with contacts outside your organisation to share insights, going out for lunches, partner summits, those kinds of opportunities for bringing partners together to meet each other and share what they’re seeing in the market.”

Get comfortable with a longer term view

In business the timelines are often short - what deals can you close this week, this month, this quarter. This often comes at the expense of collaboration. If you’re focused on closing your own deals against a deadline, you’ll be much less inclined to share, or make time for networking that isn’t attached to a defined opportunity.

When Stephen Williams was running Atlas Identity, he adopted a different approach: “We all want the same thing - sustainable growth, and a diverse set of customers and revenue. So at Intragen, we focus on the basics and trusted that the growth would come. Which it did - the total addressable market for Identity services is huge - $4tn by 2027, according to IDC. There’s enough business to go round for everyone, but if the focus is only on the short term, it’s easy to miss this bigger picture.” 

Create opportunities for networking

When I asked Stephen what vendors like Okta could do to help foster a more collaborative culture, his main message was around creating opportunities for more networking. “The channel industry is a small one, there aren’t many degrees of separation, but vendors like Okta play a key role in bringing the ecosystem together. Connecting the dots between the different regions and different channel players, it’s such an incredibly important role.”

“And for those working in the channel - I’d encourage them to invest the time in getting out there and meeting with their colleagues in other organisations, even competitors. Because let’s face it, everyone has people they’re directly competing with for revenue, but even just some low-touch information sharing can create ideas that can be mutually beneficial. Fewer and fewer deals are zero-sum games, and there’s plenty of opportunity to go round in the long term.”

 At Okta, nearly all of our largest deals involve multiple channel partners to deliver the work. This is the world we’re living in now - we’ve moved away from monolithic, on-prem deployments which were highly complex and delivered on a long-term timeline. Today’s buyers expect shorter, cloud-based projects, delivered more quickly, and with very different standards for user experience and customer service.

The channel players and vendors that thrive in this new environment will be the ones that recognise the value of collaboration, who create open ecosystems and standards to deliver more compelling products and services for end-users.