Partnering for Success - Kevin Bury at Empower 2022

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Kevin Bury, Senior Vice President, Chief Customer Officer of Enable.

Good morning, Empower! How we all doing today? All right, that's good. I got to tell you, I have been blown away by your reception to what we're now trying to do. John has talked an awful lot about this idea, and you see it here on the screen: your success drives our success. That's something that I have absolutely leaned into, and our teams are absolutely focusing on that. Today I want to talk about what that means, but before I do, I want to establish a little context. Yesterday when Lisa was talking, two things dawned on me. The first was I gotta change a whole lot of stuff in my world because I'm just trying to do too many things. The one thing I took away from her list was be very intentional. So for me, that's what I'm going to focus on. The second, and I had to change my presentation overnight because of it, is that you guys get bored very quickly, then you go into this little trough, and then you hope that I end very soon so you can get your energy back up. So in light of that, we have changed the presentation. Not really, I was going to do it anyway. But we've got stories that we're going to talk about, your experiences, and what we're doing to show what this stuff means when we execute on it. Look for that as we go through this presentation. The other thing that for me has been the overwhelming word is this idea of relationship. Relationships is really what it's all about. We talk about partnering, we talk about these things. John has been adamant: we need to view our customers as our partners. Last night I was in a heated debate with one of our partners, and we were talking about some things they were experiencing. I said, you know what, this is really predicated on us having a very strong relationship. So that's my word coming out of this: what we really have with you guys is a relationship. As we go through this presentation, I want you to think about that word. Now, while I haven't met you all, I want to extend some things that you will know about me so that when you approach me and we meet, you know a little bit about me. So we're in a relationship. The walk-up music that one of my guys chose was about this idea of being a Highway Star, because for those of you who know me well, I like to race cars. That's actually me at the SCCA Runoffs last year at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. For the Sentinel One guys, your logo would look great on the side of that car, so I would like some of that money you're funneling into the Aston Martin team to be Team Bury. That'd be good. I am a devoted family man and I love building teams, and you see a picture of our team there on Rally when we got together and had some sessions. So now you know a little bit about me. Part of being in a relationship is about listening. You guys have been very willing to share with us. I joined Enable from SolarWinds when we made the decision to spin out about two years ago. Over those last two years, I spent a lot of time listening to you, listening to what you say, what you like, what you don't like, what you want us to do. We have compiled a list. This is not the only things you've said, but these are the top six things that you have told me directly, you've told my teams, you've told our support organization, the sales organization across the board. These are the things you would like to see from us. The first of which, and this was a hard one for us, you want it to be easier to do business with us. You said, look, we love the tools, we love working with your people, but sometimes we've got to collapse over there. Sometimes you make it difficult to do business with. We've heard you, and we're leaning into that. You're going to see all of these things reflected in the programs that we're designing. The next one is that you're using the tool, and too many times I've heard, 'Gosh, I just don't feel like I'm getting enough value. I'm only using it for two functions, and I know it can do a lot more than that.' Can you help us get more value from the tools? Absolutely, we're listening there. The next one, and this one really hurts me and our organization because we spend a lot of money, time, and energy developing new features, trying to make you guys aware of it, and oftentimes we sit in meetings and say, 'I had no idea you do that.' Somebody just said it to me last night after the day we had yesterday: 'I had no idea you guys do all these things.' We've got to do a better job of helping you understand other ways we can help you run your businesses and grow your businesses. Next one, as evidenced by what we're seeing here at Empower this year, you want to engage more with your peers. I've been blown away at the level of collaboration, the level of relationship you guys want to have, your willingness to share and lean into that. So we want to facilitate more of those conversations. Number two, and this is something that's relatively new, at least for me, is how many of you are asking us, 'Hey, can you help us understand how Enable can help us grow our business?' We're going to talk about some of the programs in just a bit, but that looking back to us beyond just the tools is about how do we help you grow your businesses. We're going to focus a lot on that as we go forward. And then the last thing, and this one just really hit it for me, and I've talked a lot about this word relationship. I got to tell you guys, I've been in technology now for 35 years. I've never seen a customer base so interested in wanting a deeper relationship with their vendor. John talks about this idea of partnership. That's what you want from us, and that's what we aspire to go off and do for you. You're going to see us as we roll through what the success motions look like and how we're trying to come to market for you, aligned with these six things. But it's all predicated on wanting to have a deeper relationship. So I want you to be aware of all the things we're doing and how we're organizing to drive your success. This is our first chance in two and a half years since we've had Empower. I want to take this opportunity to walk you through in the next about 40 minutes or so. I'm going to do a deep dive on several of the offerings. We've got 17 different things. I'm not going to talk about each and every one of them, but I'm going to give you some homework to go off and look into some of these things and see how we can help you grow your business. And the next of which is how do you get more involved? In this relationship, we want you to be involved. When I think about what we've done, John talked an awful lot about this transition from the transactional business we were in when we were part of SolarWinds into much more of a relationship kind of business. That's terrific. We leaned in very heavily with the creation of the partner success motion. There are now about 100 people in Enable on my teams that are all exclusively focused on your success. That was a huge investment by the company. But we've continued in 2022 to build on that. You've heard mention of Market Builder, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. We've got Market Builder, which is a marketing automation technology you can take advantage of. We're going to talk extensively about business transformation and MSP benchmarking. These are things we're doing based on your request. We rolled out a new enhanced Services, think of that as our Professional Services, to help you get more value from the technology. So we continue to invest more in you and in our programs to drive more value. The sad thing is I continually hear about a lack of knowledge about those things. So my ask is let's engage together to drive more awareness so you guys can take advantage of them. When I think about partner success, I see it on what I call three vectors. The first, and it's really important from my perspective, it's got to start with product success. If you don't get value from the tools you're using, we don't get to pass go, we don't get to collect our $200 and continue to play the game. You've got to get value from the tools you're buying from us. The next is account success. This goes back to what you specifically told us: we want you to make it easier for us to do business with you. So we're aligning around that. And lastly, and this is the thing that really excites me the most, especially in these sessions, is how do we help you become more successful in running your businesses? We'll talk more about those. I want to talk about product success first from the perspective of what you've asked us for, which is this idea of enhanced Services. You've said to us, look, there's some great stuff we're doing, but we don't have enough capacity to do some of the things. Can you help us with this? Or hey, we're about to do a large migration from one platform to another, can you help us with that? Enhanced services are there to help you through those onboarding, to do things like premium support. This is one that there's some discussion and energy on, and I want to make sure we are aligned around this. Leo Sanchez and his team have been focused very heavily on making certain we have the appropriate skills and resources. We had a good conversation last night about what a differentiated support vehicle would look like for you guys, our Elites and our Super Elites, our very largest customers. That's something we're taking very seriously and leaning into. When I look at the overall product success, it's about getting value from the product. We've aligned different programs. Some of these you may be aware of already, some may be new to you. Everybody is very familiar with Mark Andre and the Head Nerds. Show of hands. Okay, that's great. We're continuing to invest in the Head Nerds. It's a really important component, but that's just one of the many components we have. We've invested in onboarding. One of the things Leo's group is looking at is doing health checks to come in and look at how you're using the technology, making sure it's optimized. We're going to see a story of one of our accounts, Red Eye, who was struggling with their implementation. They were to the point of being frankly frustrated, and they asked us, 'Can you guys come in and look at this?' So we'll talk about what that looks like and how we use some of these services to help them get to a better place. The MSP Institute is one of the things that I don't think gets enough love. Eris Demos has done a terrific job of building out this content. He takes all the content from the Head Nerds, he's got all of our Technical Training. We are invested very heavily in the Institute because it's a way of sharing our knowledge about our products and what we can do for you. We want to see that continue to drive more and more of your success. So that's kind of an overview. What I'd like to show you now is one program that we are launching this fall, and then I want to tell the story of the guys at Red Eye. We talked about what the Nerds have been doing with regard to boot camps. They do a terrific job of doing online boot camps multiple times every month. We're now going to do some deeper dives, some in-person training. We're going to offer coming into one of our facilities and sending your folks to do deep dive training for a couple of days. This is something we've been talking about doing. Eris has wanted to do it for a long while, and we said we have got to get this brought to market to help our partners get their people up to speed very quickly. We will be launching this hopefully later this year yet. So that's a new exciting thing we're looking at. Now I want to tell the story. Every five minutes we've got to interject some more energy. I want to introduce the story of Red Eye Tech and what they've gone through in their own words and how we were able to help them.

What a great story. I love the fact that that happens because of relationship. They came to us and said, look, we're not in a good place and we need your help. So we were able to work together through a combination of their partner success manager, the growth strategists, the Head Nerds, our enhanced services, to put together essentially a re-implementation of them so they were now in an optimized place. This is what being a partner really means. But it means that we have to first listen, we have to first show up in a way that we really are working as partners. The next section is around account success. It's the same thing based on your feedback, your request of us: make it easier. We've now realigned and restructured our account teams. We've got partner success managers, and hopefully all of you know your partner success manager by now. I'm going to give you some homework on that a little later, so make sure you're paying attention. We've got growth strategists that can come in and help you talk about where the growth potentials are within your business, and of course our sales organization. We've also got a partner Care Organization that is all around making sure that your invoices are correct, and if you have any questions they answer that, any questions around licensing. We've aligned around that stuff. We've introduced this idea of a strategic Business Review. This is a really new concept for us that we introduced about a year ago, and we continue to iterate on it. But it really aligns around what's important to you and where we are at on our relationship. I want to jump to that here because it comes down to those two key questions. Hopefully everyone is familiar with a nine box. It's a standard nine box template that we use, and we said okay, we're going to use for what's important to you based on essentially two vectors. On the x-axis, it's all around your operational maturity. Where are you now? We use profitability as one measure, but it can be around overall efficiency and effectiveness of your use of your business. And on the vertical axis, it's all about your growth. These kinds of conversations need to happen with you guys as partners. We're going to ask you very candid questions about okay, where are you? What's important to you? What are you trying to do next? What do you talk about with your investors? What do you talk about with your leaders? Because that's critical for us to understand how do we best align to help you go off and achieve that. The second question is where are you with regard to your relationship at Enable? How are you in using the technology? How can we help you get more value from it? From that we can then design the right kind of program to align your goals to our offers and to make sure we bring the right people to bear to help you maximize what you're trying to do in your business. I want to announce a story of a company out of Katy, Texas called Bite Time. These guys are a wonderful story. This is a little bit longer story, but this is the kind of story that to me shows again the power of what a relationship could mean when we truly come together, we share what's going on inside of our world, and then we get alignment. We can do great things together. So let me introduce you to the fellas at Bite Time.

That is a great story of what a relationship can mean. That is what we aspire to have with all of you. Not all of you are going to be football coaches, that's okay. But that's the kind of relationship, that's the kind of partnership we want to have with you. John has been adamant, he's been very clear with his leadership team: we need to focus on the relationships we have with you guys. It's critically important. Your success drives our success. One of the things that came through the story there of Bite Time is this idea of transforming their business. I want to bring up the stage Rob Wilburn, who is our Vice President of Partner Growth. He has been leading this business transformation practice for us, and I've asked him to come up and just spend a few minutes talking with you guys about what he's seeing and what we're doing and how companies like Bite Time have been able to take advantage of that, and then how you guys may be able to as well. Rob, awesome.

Yeah, thanks so much, Rob. So those are some of the new programs. And when John talks about this idea of us helping you build your businesses, that's the kind of stuff that we're now investing in and we're doing for you. Yes, Mike Edler and Company are doing great things with the product, but there's also this whole idea of wrapping the relationship and services around those great products. I want to talk about another product or offer that you've heard mentioned a couple times. John mentioned it. Tracy Trachier has done a terrific job of this little pilot program that has grown up to be something very special. And unfortunately, it's one of those things that's too much of a great well-kept secret, and we need to fix that. Market Builder is a program that was designed because one of the things again we've heard from you, you've shared with us when we're talking with you, that you struggle with sales and marketing. And we said, okay, look, we got Stephanie Hammond who's done our Head Nerd focused on sales. We've got now another opportunity to bring more value-add content to you. Something that is included, you don't have to pay additional for it. It's available to all of you, and it's content that is purpose-built for MSPs to market yourselves and your services. We have three different campaign types: around security, various verticals, the value of managed services. So whether you're trying to attract new customers to your practice or your services, or if you're looking to deepen the relationship you have with your customers, there's content here. It's everything from web content, blog content, social. There are more than 1,500 different social posts. There's videos, capabilities all built into this thing. And Tracy, like I said, has just done a different job. I know she's got a booth over in the Expo Center. She ran a couple of breakout sessions yesterday. This is something that I think is so powerful and so valuable that it's free, and so you guys should absolutely be taking advantage of it. We've got one more video to show. This is a short one, but this shows the power of what Market Builder can do, and this is with their friends at C W.

All right, that's going to be one of your homework pieces later. So that's a great story again of what we're trying to do to help you guys grow your businesses. There was another bit of feedback that we got from you. You're asking us, hey, by the way, we want to look at a structure where we can extend our services. We want to look at how do we be able to move to, for example, 7 by 24 support. So earlier this year, we created a new partnership with our friends at IT by Design. Sunny and his team down here in the front, they offer the ability for you all to extend your capabilities, to expand through... I've learned that we're not supposed to be calling it an outsourced NOC, so I apologize for that, an extended NOC. But the idea here is you now have the ability to expand your own service delivery. You can offload some of those things that maybe... I like the way you position it, Sunny, backstage. And you can take care of servicing your customers, making sure that you're doing the high value-add things while they're handling some of the heavy lifting on the back end for you. So it's an important relationship for us. We have again this idea being that we're in a constant relationship with you where we're listening to what you're saying to us, we're trying to drive more innovation, be responsive to what you all are looking for. So I want to recap here, and then I'm gonna turn it over. I talked about this idea of partnering for success, and it's really about mutual success because we recognize, as John has talked about, our success is predicated on your success. Everything we do is in the spirit of that. Now we've got these three vectors: we've got product success, I walked through those; we've got account success and how we're aligning our teams to make sure that we show up in the way that you want them to, and that you can engage with us; and now our exciting new business success. This slide is an important one. This is one that you guys should do a screenshot of. It has a nice single-pane view, if you will, of all the things that we're doing around this. And you'll note the hour in this is our shared success, and that's a really important construct for us. So now you got to get to your notepads out because I'm going to give you some homework. What I want you to take from this and do now: first of which, you got to schedule a strategic Business Review. If we want to get alignment, and you want to get alignment with us as we do with you, let's talk about what you care about. Let's talk about where you're at in your journey. What are the things you all are focusing on, and how can we help you? If there are issues with your product, we need to know about that. Let's make sure that we really get clear about what you're trying to do, where you're taking your business, and how you could use our help. Because we are here. We're extending our arms, our hands, and say look, we'll come along on this journey with you. Just share with us, be open with us. That's one. The next one: get your teams involved with these business success programs. The early response, and it's a small cohort I admit, but we've had more than 100 groups get involved with us. It's really important. There's great learnings because it extends what we've been doing here at Empower. It's mostly peer-to-peer. Get involved. Let us help you discover new ideas, new ways of bringing your services and new services to markets. That's a really important one. And then lastly, if you haven't already, I would tell you you got to take advantage of Market Builder. Stop by the booth, talk to Tracy, talk to Stephanie Hammond. This is a great program, guys. And even if you say, 'But I've got a good sales thing,' it's a bunch of free content that your teams can take and use. We actually have partners doing that. They take our content and put it into their own engine. That completely makes sense as well. So we've covered a lot of good content. I really appreciate what you've been for my teams. I appreciate all of the levels of effort you've gone to to make yourselves open to what we're trying to do. I love Empower and what it's brought together for us. I'm looking forward to spending more time with you. If you have any questions for me or any member of my team, please don't hesitate to reach out. And with that, I want to now turn it over to our keynote speaker for the day. Hopefully this is a name that you guys are familiar with. Ken Schmidt is a very dynamic speaker. He is the former director of communications for Harley-Davidson. He is a noted speaker and an award-winning author. So let's welcome him to the stage now.