Jay McBain: How to Turbocharge Your Channel Career

Channel Journeys Podcast

After years of non-stop growth and massive hiring by the big tech companies, we’re suddenly seeing large-scale layoffs. Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce together have announced 29,000 people being let go in just the past 3 months. What impact will this have on your channel career? What impact with it have on your partners? Jay McBain, Chief Channel Analyst at Canalys, shares how to turbocharge your channel career and thrive in this new brave world of layoffs and massive channel transformation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Here are 10 things I learned from Jay about how to navigate your channel career in 2023:

1. Mass tech layoffs, not seen in years, are back. Salesforce just announced they’re letting 10% of their workforce go.
2. The channel stands to benefit. Partners have had a hard time competing for talent with the tech giants who offered massive salaries and lavish benefits.
3. Tech companies are realigning talent with strategies and priorities that have shifted over the past year due to economic conditions including massive inflation, high interest rates, and supply chain shortages.
4. Channel programs are going through transformational changes, creating new opportunities for channel pros.
5. Start looking around and learn what others are doing, find out who’s playing leading roles in this transformation, read what the leading consulting firms are writing about the ecosystem. You need to think beyond the transaction and think more broadly about partnerships.
6. If you’re early in your career, build your peer network. Build strong relationships with up and comers your age, rather than trying to bond with today’s executives. You’re going to move up with your contemporaries. Ten, twenty years from now they’ll be in leadership roles.
7. Connect and engage with the partner and channel communities. Build a voice and brand for yourself.
8. Partner leaders are joining the C-Suite, but it’s not who you might think. Of the 20 Chief Partner Officers appointed in 2022, not one has ever been a channel chief. Most are coming from top strategic consulting firms.
9. These CPOs have a different set of KPIs. They’re measured on things like co-innovation and creating customer value rather than on transactions.
10. Channel Chiefs need to move past empire building to a distributed approach. Embed partner-led people in all teams, sales, marketing, customer success, product management, HR, every line of business. Makes sure you don’t own your own silo.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Connect with Jay on LinkedIn
• See which tech companies are having layoffs
• Subscribe to the Partner Hacker daily email
• Join Partnership Leaders

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