John (00:01.314)
Well, hey, Brian, welcome to the Partnership Path in Real Life. I’m so glad you decided to come on the show with us. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to do this. Before we get going though, let me give you a chance to introduce yourself to our listeners. Tell us a little bit about who you are, where you work, and how long you’ve been working with partners.

Brian (00:20.362)
Yeah, no, thank you so much, John. And a little tidbit before I introduce myself, I’ve known John since, gosh, I think it’s 2000. We used to work at the CRM company, Onyx Software. So might be dating myself, but if anyone has that, that’s how John and I have gotten, stayed and remain connected. So with that being said, thank you, John, for having me. So I’m Brian Galicia, been at Microsoft. It’s hard to believe. like I just celebrated 18 years a few months ago. And yeah, it’s like, my gosh, time flies.

John (00:28.078)
Yeah.

John (00:44.714)
my gosh.

Brian (00:49.576)
But when you think about partnerships, I’ve been on the partnership side for a while in different ways, but in my current role at Microsoft, I lead a data portfolio. used to be the dynamics or biz apps person. I recently switched this fiscal year to lead a data portfolio. And all that means is I lead global partnerships for independent software vendors. So for those of you in the technology industry who know what ISV is, I lead a team of people that are driving some of our largest data partners within Microsoft.

John (01:16.46)
Nice. Now, and Brian, it would only be fair of me since you did, you know, talk about how long we’ve known each other. I have to kind of give kudos to you because you spent some time at LinkedIn. And based on that, I’ve actually written a book about leveraging LinkedIn in sales, which is an awesome book. I want to give you just a quick plug on that book. If you’re out there, if you’re trying to learn how to leverage LinkedIn for partnerships, for sales, anything of that, it is a great resource to you. So.

Brian (01:36.394)
Thank you.

John (01:46.029)
Love it.

Brian (01:46.346)
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that shout out, John. Yeah, I was co-authored. if you’re interested in how to leverage LinkedIn, because of course, we’ve got partner roles and the things that John and I are going to talk about with decision influence and partnerships, selling and selling Acumen is a big part of it. And what tools can you use for selling Acumen? LinkedIn.

John (02:04.332)
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Awesome. Well, and I have a feeling that’s going to tie in a little bit to our topic today. we just did, Tony and I just did this episode on decision influence. I know you listened to it. So let me just open it wide up to start with. Tell me kind of when you listened to that episode, what stood out for you? What really resonate? What made you think, my gosh, I want to talk about that?

Brian (02:10.89)
100%.

Brian (02:15.924)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brian (02:28.744)
Yeah, I think you said it towards, I think the middle or the end, that any type of partnership or channel role, super complex because the person has to do so many things. But what it requires is this acumen around sales engagement or stakeholder alignment or who influences the decision. And you think about it. And for those of you listening to this have been in sales and transition to partnership or in partnerships and you’re doing sales execution because that’s what partnerships are about.

That component is so relevant because you do have to understand who makes the decision. people think, it’s easy. It’s the partner leader. Well, yes, that’s the case. Their job is accountable for driving growth through partnerships. But usually, the decisions that happen in partnerships is usually what I found personally. The chief revenue officer is a huge influencer or decision maker in that process. The CEO in some of our partnerships

John (03:21.272)
Yeah, right.

Brian (03:26.558)
Guess what? The CEO is very tight-lipped on where he or she wants to spend and invest time with partnerships. Sometimes it’s a product decision. So you could have the chief product officer, the chief technology officer, or the CIO make a decision. So all those things really resonated because I think what Tony and you talk about, one of the things that came up multiple times when people listen to that is what is the alternative? And I love that question because when people get into partnerships, it’s kind of like sales.

John (03:35.438)
That’s right.

Brian (03:54.024)
When you’re trying to convince a buyer to buy your product or service, what is the alternative? If they decide to stay with what they’re doing in decision, which is one of the most common scenarios that happen, is that, okay, if they did that, what happens? If they didn’t do that, what happens? And in partnerships, I love the thing when you think about decision influence, because you have to understand when people are doing all these things, what is the outcome they’re trying to solve? And in my experience, it always comes down to revenue. If you have a joint value proposition of what

John (04:07.576)
Right? Yeah.

Brian (04:24.084)
partner XYZ is doing to what your company is doing, it can’t just be one sided. It can’t benefit one. cannot benefit the other. It has to benefit both. And when you can align the right influence and know who the stakeholders are and understand what they care most about, then it can really help to drive, how do you approach the partnership and all the things. And the one thing that we talked about in the pre-show, John, that also I want to call out is the fact that you have to understand what I believe the term you use is operating period.

So your organization and the partner you’re trying to work with could have totally different operating periods. As an example, Microsoft, our operating period is somewhat unique. We start our fiscal year in July and we end in June. Very few companies do that. Most companies do a calendar year or they do it like just slightly offsetting the calendar year, like starting in February or March and do it. So why does that matter? It matters because when you’re thinking about the decision influence, people’s decisions in my experience,

are different when you start a fiscal year to when you end a fiscal year because pipeline execution versus closing deals is much different when you’re doing that. And so all those things really came together, John, that I found super fascinating. And I think the last thing I’ll comment on is the contract. think Tony made it where even if you try to do all these things, you also have to understand what is in your control. Sometimes there’s legal types of things. Sometimes there’s certain dependencies on country or language or all that stuff.

John (05:23.35)
Yeah. Yup.

John (05:28.481)
Right.

Brian (05:49.898)
So you have to also think about the influence, not just of the decision makers, but the environment that you’re working in. Are you an approved vendor? Do they have to be approved vendor? All those things come into play to make an align to the decision influence and partnerships.

John (05:59.075)
Yeah.

John (06:04.162)
Yeah. my gosh, Brian, you, put so many things in there just now. want to, I want to kind of backtrack on a couple of them. cause I want to hear more about it. One of the things you talked about was this whole alternatives, right? One of the things Tony and I talked about is that understanding how the partner is actually looking at the decision is what determines how you determine what the alternatives are. Right. And I, you know, salespeople fall into this trap enough.

partner people fall into this trap all the time that they think the decision is a simple yes no decision. I going to go to market with Brian? Yes or no. And that’s not really what they’re thinking. They’re thinking, am I going to go to route with Brian or this person or this person or am I going to do something totally different with that investment? Talk to me a little bit about kind of, especially in that Microsoft role.

Brian (06:40.714)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (06:56.17)
That’s right.

John (07:00.0)
and your team, what are some of the things that you guys run across in terms of alternatives and how to figure that out?

Brian (07:04.81)
Yeah, it’s a great question, John, because you think about Microsoft and how big we are. The fact that we have partnerships that are co-op petition or we have what I refer to as first party, third party friction. So what that means is that there are things because Microsoft does a whole bunch of stuff as people know, like we touch many different things. And so we have to have partnerships to fill certain areas where we’re not good at, whether it’s industry scenarios or certain use cases. We just can’t do everything.

John (07:15.212)
Yeah.

Brian (07:32.926)
But there’s also scenarios where we have partnerships that do similar things that fill those gaps. But in essence, they also compete with us because they overlap in some of the capabilities we function with. So to your point, the alternatives, there is the thing where, again, what’s the joint value proposition? How are we both making money? And sometimes that’s a combination of them, a company making their business bet on Microsoft, but they also don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket, which I totally get and understand. So they may go to alternatives.

you have companies when you go to marketplaces, most of the time you’ll find that company XYZ, and I won’t mention specific names, but you’ll notice that if you go to a marketplace, you’re going to find that that, especially in the software industry for ISVs or SIs or services, they’re going to list their solution in multiple places. And you shouldn’t be alarmed by that because partners have to do and scale in many different areas. It’s kind of like the Apple versus Android scenario.

John (08:22.702)
Yeah? Yeah.

Brian (08:28.37)
you would find that most companies who are building applications on a phone experience, they’re not just going to bet their business on one or the other. They’re going to do both because they realize there’s a market opportunity to do that. And to your exactly your point, John, I think it’s views the same way in this level of partnership. The alternatives are always going to be the balance of, if I do this, how much area or growth am I going to do in this specific partnership versus something else?

and aligns you very well to other things that you’ve helped Microsoft learn through your programs, et cetera. Is it a growth partner? Is it a maintain partner or opportunistic type of partnership? And those partnerships then align towards the decision framework, the stakeholder alignment, all these things that all come together to then drive how do you drive the right conversations with partnerships.

John (09:12.77)
Yeah. So, Brian, let’s get super pragmatic here. When you’re working with either directly with a partner yourself or you’re working with one of the people on your team who’s trying to work with a partner, how do you help them figure out what that alternative is? What’s your advice to someone who is used to just assuming it’s a yes, no decision? How do you help somebody expand that? What kind of questions should they be asking the partner?

Brian (09:31.466)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (09:42.506)
Yeah, no, I love it. So you will probably resonate with this job because in sales, what is the first thing you do in sales? First of all, is you have to do a lot of research. So how do you do that research? I’ll just give a plug for LinkedIn because one, there’s a goldmine of information of what’s top of mind for potential decision makers because you follow them and you pay attention to what they’re talking about or what the company page is talking about to get that insight. If they’re a public company, first and foremost, you need to be reading the annual report. You need to be reading the 10K. You need to be reading all these things.

to understand where’s the company going, what’s the direction they’re going. Once you get all those things, then understanding the decision people you’re going to go with, the biggest thing is you have to build trust. You have to build relationships with these people. You can’t just go in and assume, it’s yes or no, to your point, a yes or no answer. Part of it is once you build that trust, they’re going to start to open up information to you that you’re not going to know unless you’ve built that trust. so when you open up questions, is something about like these perfect questions. What is the alternative? If you didn’t do it with us,

Who else would you do this with? How would you grow? mean, just utilizing the line of thinking you’re doing, it could be a simple question as that. like, if we didn’t exist, if Microsoft didn’t exist, where would you grow in a partnership? And that’s a question that I’ve asked. It’s like, hey, you know what? If you decided not to do it with us, like, what would you do? And it’s interesting that when you pause and you don’t say anything, again, in sales,

John (11:01.56)
Yeah.

Brian (11:07.284)
Throw out that question to elicit, it’s not a yes or no answer, but throw out that question to allow them to elaborate on it and just listen. And then ask follow up questions, all that stuff. And that’s, I think, the biggest guidance that I try to drive with the partner managers that report to me is do some of that research, have a point of view, build the relationships, and then ask open-ended questions that will help give you the understanding of where else should I be taking the conversation.

John (11:31.726)
Yeah, it’s funny, right? If the more people do research, the more they sort of invest their knowledge into the partner company, the less likely they are to ask those yes, no questions. Cause now they’ve actually got enough data to be curious, to actually be like, well, yeah, but you know, and I love that question of if you don’t do it with us, what are you going to do? Or, and my favorite version of that is, Hey, if for whatever reason we can’t work this out, what are you going to do?

Brian (11:50.206)
Mm-hmm.

John (12:02.318)
Right? Like, so it doesn’t just say, Hey, it’s totally your decision, but like, Hey, we’re in this together, but like, what if we can’t figure it out? What are you going to do? Right? It’s a great way to kind of get them to be like, well, actually, you know, as a matter of fact, I’ve thought about that. And, you know, then you get something. look, one of the other things I wanted to, I wanted to dig down with you in on, we talked, you mentioned this stuff that Tony talks about in terms of contracts and what it triggered for me.

Brian (12:10.826)
That’s right.

Brian (12:21.31)
Yeah.

John (12:32.438)
was how often in partner relationships when we’re thinking about decisions, we forget about all the outside influencers. We forget about the people who don’t actually work for the partner that might have an influence on whatever that decision is. And that ranges right from really small partners. It could be as weird as like the owner’s spouse, right?

Brian (12:58.154)
Yep.

John (12:59.448)
to really big partners, could be, who’s their investment firm? Who’s the private equity firm that’s got money in this? Who is their other big partner that they work with? Are they already in bed with Amazon or whatever? And is that gonna influence this, right? Give me your thoughts on some of that and how you kind of figure some of that outside influence stuff out.

Brian (13:09.93)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I love it, John. I’ll give you some specific, without mentioning it, give you some specific examples. So first and foremost, you think about as big as Microsoft, how many people come to us and say, hey, can you buy our product or services to run our stuff internally? Because we can’t do everything. Sometimes we try to build it ourselves, that’s an outside influence. If a company has sold their solution to Microsoft,

John (13:34.894)
Yep. Yep.

Brian (13:43.87)
guess what happens? That’s a big influence of the partnership. And you have to think about that type of stuff because you have procurement people, you have other people that do nothing with a partnership, but utilize that solution inside of our organization that plays a role because if they decide, know what, we’re changing direction, we are not going to renew that contract. uh-oh, that’s going to impact the partnership because guess what? That’s like,

John (13:44.236)
Yeah. Yeah.

John (14:05.646)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian (14:10.494)
They’re banking on the fact that Microsoft utilizes the solution because it’s a conversation, it’s a case study, it’s all these things. And when we take a direction, different direction, because sometimes that happens, what do you do? So you have to address that. Another good example, and I’ll, let me move myself from an ISV to a software integrator or what we refer to as SIs. You can imagine, especially with Microsoft or the people we work with, there are software companies that work with these software integrators who are also auditors.

And when you think about when I say that term for people who never don’t know what that means, you basically, when you’re a public company, you have a third party accounting firm that evaluates what you’re doing or is your books and all that stuff, is they’re all up on the legal standpoint. So you also have to work with that because that’s outside of influence. If you have XYZ auditor that is your auditor or that partner’s auditor, you have to be cautious because it cannot show bias. It can’t show specific types of things.

John (14:58.456)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

John (15:05.006)
That’s right.

Brian (15:06.686)
Those are just some examples from, I’m sure there’s many more, but those are ones that when you mentioned that John, that come to mind because we are faced with that. those are recent examples that are the teams I work with that report to me that deal with all time. And you have to just sort of balance those out so that you’re doing the right thing and doing it in the right context with the right legal aspects of it, all that good stuff.

John (15:27.79)
Totally. God, Brian, I could talk to you for an hour about this. You and I, I think the same way as you. love your perspective, but we try and keep these pretty short. So let’s close out on this. Look, we have a segment of our audience that are relatively new or inexperienced to partner management. And so I try and close a lot of these episodes with, someone like you who’s got all these years of experience. And if we just…

Brian (15:31.668)
Hahaha

Brian (15:39.305)
Yeah.

John (15:56.824)
try and narrow your focus just on decision influence. What’s the one or two things that you would give as advice to someone who’s kind of new into this that they need to get good at to be a partner manager?

Brian (16:12.144)
Yeah, I love the question. First and foremost, I would say if you’re new to this or getting into this, find a mentor. That’s a more generic thing, but I think first and foremost, identify, work with your manager and say, you know what, who in the organization would you recommend that I kind of shadow fall? And you get this job because you think about selling, same thing. You’re a new seller. What’s the best thing you do? Anchor yourself to amazing sellers that can take the time to go give you that stuff. So that being said,

John (16:20.024)
Yeah. Yeah.

John (16:27.512)
Yeah.

Brian (16:39.838)
I think the other component where how do you get started? You have to be to what you said in your conversation. You have to be good at many things. So when I think about it, don’t just view yourself as a relationship builder because people try to channel, try to say, partner guy or partner woman. that’s just a relationship builder. They don’t do anything else. No, no, no. You want to change that narrative because partner roles are super complex to your point and you have to be good at so many things. Relationships are important, but selling acumen, all these things you’re talking about with decision influence.

John (16:51.032)
Right.

John (16:55.064)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian (17:08.265)
you have to be thinking ahead to understand when these decisions are going to potentially happen, you have to be in front of those things way before someone makes that decision. You have to be in those conversations so they’re thinking about how do I build a new product? How do I offer a new service? How do I co-sell together? You have to understand what the outcome is with these decision makers all the way up to the CEO potentially, and then provide a framework to guide the right people to the right process. hopefully that’s, again, you and I could be talking for,

a long time, but to be conscious of people consuming this, yes, I mean, it is just being able to learn new things and be able to take it for, it’s not just relationships, it’s about selling acumen that you have to be thinking of.

John (17:49.548)
Love it. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Love your perspective and just God, you got so much experience. I just love having you on the show. Maybe we can have you back again on another topic sometime.

Brian (17:59.978)
Another topic. Yeah, I’d love to. So yeah, I would love the feedback too. So if you feel like, hey, this was insightful, ping John and say, hey, we need to have Brian come in for the next thing, whatever that topic is. And yeah, I’m more than happy to come back because I love these types of things. So happy to.

John (18:14.826)
Awesome. Thanks a bunch, Brian. Really appreciate it.

Brian (18:18.056)
Okay, my pleasure. Take care, everybody. Cheers.