Automated Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Partner Strategy Network Podcast. I'm Wesley Coelho and I'm here with Mark Sochan. Well, this week we're going to be talking about GSI centers of excellence.
Alan:
In order to ramp up either GSI or RSIs in today's world, you have to focus on creating online training and certification, robust training. If you don't have that, you have to train them individually. And it's super costly, super expensive. It takes forever to do. If you have a robust training program, you basically go to a GSI and an RSI with is, you know, here's the value proposition.
You sign them up. And as part of that, they're going to ask, they will always ask. So how do I get ramped up on your technology? Well, you go to this link, here's the training paths for the different levels and all of this kind of stuff in our different products. Part of that particular discussion is then, yes, we want as many of your people trained as possible because it's a mind share game.
You want more of your people trained on your products then your competitors. Because where the mind share comes from. But part of it is you need that deep knowledge expertise within these companies. And that's where the COE comes in. With an RSI, it could be as few as three people, two or three people, but they become the go-to people that they put on every single implementation.
So they might put one of their COE people on an implementation and bring into that have taken some of your courses. You never want people that have not even heard of your product on an implementation. That's where the training is really important. With the GSI, it's different. They will put more people into a COE and it's probably even more important with the GSI because what the GSI will typically do.
They're so time and materials focused. There's a big difference actually, between what I would call the Indian based GSI and the Western or non-Indian based GSIs and the way they think and what their metrics are. It's always what's really critical at the end of the day when you're talking to the right executive is what are your metrics, right?
How do you measure yourself? What's success look like to you? And it's different. You'll find when you ask that question from an executive with an Indian GSI versus a non-Indian GSI, it’s different. With the GSI they’re so time and material focused.
They want their own people within their own vertical practice to be used because part of their metric is utilization of their resources. And so at the end of the day, instead of using the COE that we've just set up. They'll put their own verticalized practice people in there.
And what I've found over and over again is if you're not monitoring it, let's say 25 to 30, 40% of those people have never even heard of your product before they land on site or now doing it virtually. That's a problem. And that's the problem you have to mitigate. How do you go through and actually monitor that?
You have to go through. And basically for any implementation. And it's tough to do is go to that partner and basically set expectations. You need to tell me if I'm going to give you all of the services as opposed to position my own services, you need to tell me who specifically you're putting on this particular project. And they're going to say no, and you have to insist on it and you have to push that these people have to be trained and certified.
And you need to tell them that I'm going to go into our own system to verify that they've been trained and certified at least at the entry level, because otherwise your implementation is going to suck. And then you're at the end of the day, you have zero chance of upsell and cross sell.