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Strategies to survive the talent war in the cloud’s third wave

June 14, 2021 by Julie Barker Leave a Comment

After working 15 years in talent strategy, recruiting and people operations for tech and IT consulting companies, I thought I had seen pretty much all there was to see when it came to trends in hiring. Then the universe laughed. Cue 2020, the year that changed the world, trapped us in our homes, and created unemployment levels we hadn’t seen since the Great Depression.

Now in 2021, we’re seeing demand for nearly everything come rushing back – especially demand for tech talent. Nearly everyone is short-staffed, but the problem is particularly significant for professional services companies, whose revenue correlates directly to having the right people to do the work. Cleveland Research estimates that many technology service partners are already 20-25% short on the people needed to deliver on their existing book of business.

With customer demand coming back faster than expected in some regions, and COVID still causing devastation in regions with a high concentration of tech talent like India, service providers are fighting a war to attract and keep top talent. Many companies are throwing money at the problem by raising salaries, instituting referral and signing bonuses, etc. This may be a necessary tactic given the current state of things, but there are other things companies can do to attract top talent that may have a more lasting effect on their employer brand. Before I go there though, let’s talk about how we got here.

What is driving the war for talent?

Even the companies who emerged from 2020 successful were cautious about hiring throughout last year, unsure of how the pandemic would impact their businesses and what a recovery would look like. On the flip side, employees were equally uncertain. Even those employees who had survived rounds of layoffs chose not to make job moves last year, sticking with the job they had so they could focus on juggling the unique nuances of the pandemic, like home schooling.

All that pent up demand is now being released as the economy recovers. Tech companies are resuming growth, with many seeing a huge spike in demand from customers that put off projects during the pandemic. The hiring required to keep up with demand, combined with the layoffs, furloughs and lack of hiring from the last year, means we’re now seeing 18 months worth of hiring squeezed into a few quarters – often from the same pool of candidates.

This is happening at the same time employees are feeling more optimistic and are starting to make the career moves they’ve been putting off for the past 12-18 months. Prudential’s Pulse on the American Worker Survey estimates that 1 in 4 workers is planning to look for new opportunities once the pandemic is over. While this data isn’t tech-specific or services-specific, it does point to a growing trend that seems to already be taking place when I see the growing attrition rates happening in firms.

While this supply and demand imbalance might feel incredibly acute right now, the challenges associated with hiring experienced and motivated tech talent will remain for years to come. Tercera’s recent ebook on the Third Wave of cloud computing points to a growing digital skills gap that cloud consultancies will need to address in the coming years.

This is why it’s time to rethink the way you recruit for talent, not only to get through our current talent situation but to prepare for the future. This new generation of talent has been shaped forever by a global pandemic, and convincing them to join a company now requires far more thought and finesse than simply throwing money at them and offering free food for offices they may not even visit.

Three trends changing recruiting in a post-COVID era

The interview process has accelerated.

In the past, even candidates for remote positions would typically come into the office for in-person interviews at the final stages of the process. Today, most companies have gone to all-virtual interviewing. This opens things up to move a lot faster, even if a candidate is interviewing with the same number of people as they would have before. It also means people can interview with many more companies at once from the convenience of their computer screen, allowing them to assess their options and the market more thoroughly. While these virtual-only interviews may get balanced out with in-person conversations post COVID, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a full return to the old way of interviewing. Nor should we.

Candidates are all in on loving what they do.

For many, 2020 caused a perspective shift because it showed us just how short life is. People are rethinking their priorities; in response, employers need to meet candidates where they are, learning about what that individual is looking for. It’s more important than ever that recruiters can connect job tasks with a greater purpose – both for the company and for the candidate.

Companies may need to rethink offers.

Salaries for some of the most skilled or niche employees are already high, but the gap between supply and demand is boosting them further. While many companies default to boosting salary offers when fighting for top talent, they must balance this with offering other attractive benefits to lure people in. Otherwise, they risk having new hires stall out on pay once they arrive, because they came in at the top of the salary range. Companies are realizing they need to hire and develop instead of simply looking to find that unicorn candidate with the perfect set of skills and hoping they’ll stick around.

It’s time to build your employer brand

Companies need to build a brand that extends beyond one that customers want to work with, to one that employees want to work for. This is especially important for people-based businesses. You won’t have too many happy customers without great people to support them. When I counsel my clients at Cultivate Talent, I recommend they bring together the following elements to create a brand, story and processes to attract top talent in a post-COVID world.

Start with your purpose

People are looking for purpose and connection – a reason to work for your company beyond compensation. Make sure your organization, and everyone in your organization, understands why you do what you do and make it a core element of your employer brand perspective. This will have an impact far beyond just recruiting. Telling this story and how this purpose looks in practice on your website, in your meetings, on your social feeds and across future content will help you build a pipeline of candidates you can tap into 3-12 months from now. In the end, it’s important to convey the greater impact you’re trying to have beyond the services you offer.

Create an army of brand ambassadors

While you may not know it, your employees are the best and most credible advocates for your brand. They can become ambassadors by expressing their passion for your company and its work through their own social media posts, which is one great way to generate energy and interest. You can help your employees do this by creating content they can share. However, be sure you leave it open for them to preserve authenticity in what they say. That will resonate better than any produced message ever could.

Focus on culture

This one should already be at the top of your recruiting strategy but it’s becoming even more important. People are craving connection—particularly if they’re working virtually. Professional services firms will have to talk more than ever about their vision and values, centering their business and their people around these ideals. More companies are ensuring their job postings link to passion and fulfillment, telling stories through their current employees’ voices, sharing what they’ve done to make an impact in the last year and focusing on how they led their people and their businesses during 2020 or what it feels like to work there .

Change your recruiting mindset

Just as people should nurture their networks and not tap into them only when they need something, companies need to do the same. Don’t only reach out to people when you have an open role. Instead, create regular opportunities for people who are interested in your company to learn about you and what you’re doing. Create the expectation within your organization that recruiting is every leader’s job – not just HR’s. People go to work with people, especially in a services business, so capitalize on that and deploy your incredible leaders to bring in more top talent.

Rethink benefits

While candidates don’t make their decisions solely based on benefits, offering competitive and unique options can make them stay once they’ve come onboard. Unique benefits like four-day work weeks, more all-company holidays where everyone has off so people can actually tune out, or giving people paid time away from work to serve in their community are attractive and hard to replace.

Benefits should also prioritize mental health, self-care and wellbeing. Historically, mental health benefits have been overlooked or buried within an overall benefits package. Today, employees expect their companies to care about their health holistically, extending past traditional medical benefits to include gym and wellness memberships, free access to various mental health apps and more.

Optimize for remote work

It’s unclear whether the shift to “work from anywhere” will remain as companies shift to hybrid models or even a return to full-time, office-based positions. However, firms that optimize their operations for a virtual workforce, and who make in-person attendance the exception rather than the rule, will be much better prepared to recruit for the future.

The coming year will be both exciting and challenging for our entire industry. I hope this advice can make your recruiting efforts even more successful, although keep in mind, recruiting is only the first half of the battle. Once you’ve got talent in the door, the real work begins to ensure they stay engaged and enthusiastic to ensure your long-term success. Stay tuned for more insights on how to keep employees happy and connected to your mission once they’re onboard.

How to be a services leader in the cloud’s third wave

May 25, 2021 by Chris Barbin Leave a Comment

Something big is happening in the cloud computing space. Salesforce calls it Cloud 3.0. We call it the cloud’s third wave. Far too many call it simply digital transformation. Whatever you call it, there is a perfect storm happening right now, with multiple forces coming together to drive more mindshare and more money into cloud technology and the vendors that play in that space.

The first force is no surprise to anyone — the pandemic. COVID dramatically accelerated digital initiatives inside most companies. As Satya Nadalla, the CEO of Microsoft put in, “we saw two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Those initiatives aren’t slowing. In fact, they’re accelerating.

The second force is the maturation of cloud computing. Businesses of every size have bought into the cloud model, and are finding new and creative ways to embed it into their business and customer-facing processes. A maturing space also brings a bigger, more diverse group of vendors, which means more choice for customers, and unfortunately, more complexity.

A third force is the surplus of capital in the market today. Consider just some of these stats:

Cloud companies now have a $2 trillion market cap (Bessemer)
In 2020 alone, $186 billion was invested into private cloud companies (Bessemer)
In Q4 2020 alone, five cloud vendors generated $37 billion in revenue (Cloud Wars)
45 cloud consultancies were acquired in the first 5 months of 2021 with an aggregate value of more than $3 billion (Tercera/451 Research)

Most entrepreneurs and investors will tell you at least 50% of success is being in the right place at the right time, and for those in cloud services, you couldn’t pick a better time. But being in the right place at the right time is only half of the equation. The other half comes down to execution, and building and scaling a business (especially a services business) in the cloud’s third wave looks far different than it did 20 years ago.

As an operator in the services space for more than 25 years, a founder of one of the earliest cloud consultancies, and now an investor and advisor to the next generation of cloud consultancies, I’ve seen the evolution of cloud services first hand. So has Jeff Kaplan, the founder of THINKstrategies, a strategic consulting firm focused on the business implications of transitioning from product-centric to services-centric business models.

Jeff has been a thought leader in both services and cloud computing for three decades. He’s a respected industry analyst, and is now a strategy and go-to-market advisor for Tercera’s portfolio companies. He’s seen A LOT over the years, so when it came down to documenting what’s going on at the intersection of cloud and services right now, I couldn’t think of a better partner.

Our newest ebook, What It Takes to Be a Services Leader in the Cloud’s Third Wave, covers the evolution of cloud computing, the new players in the space, as well as the business models, labor models and skills that consultancies need if they want to succeed in the third wave.

Jeff and I will be holding a webinar and live Q&A about the third wave and some of the concepts in this ebook on Thursday, June 3 at 10am ET. To join that webinar (or access the recording), register here.

We hope you’ll join us!

Building a smarter strategy for international expansion

May 18, 2021 by Jean Manaud Leave a Comment

Today, international expansion is top of mind for most professional services firms. Expanding into new territory can not only strengthen your market positioning, help drive revenue growth and expand your customer base, it can also diversify your businesses and give you greater access to talent. That last aspect may be the most urgent need these days, as companies around the world scramble to find people with the tech skills needed for the third wave of cloud computing.

Expanding into new regions and countries can bring a host of benefits, but it shouldn’t be taken lightly. It requires capital to build a new presence in a new location, as well as time, focus and resources from a firm’s leadership team.

Global expansion can be costly and bumpy if you aren’t ready, so getting the timing right is important — something I’ve learned first-hand after two decades in professional services, leading international operations across 40 countries, and founding one of the first Workday and ServiceNow consulting firms in Europe. This 2-part blog series is meant to relay what I’ve learned about the opportunities and challenges of international expansion based on that experience.

In this blog, I’ll cover topics such as how to know when it’s the right time to expand, how to prepare for the risks that come with that expansion, and how to think about an effective strategy. In part 2, I’ll talk about how to execute an operating framework for expansion, which I call “the country playbook.”

Let’s start with the first big question.

Is it the right time to expand?

Services companies initiate global expansion for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s an opportunity that can’t be missed, like a proactive request from an important customer or your main technology partner. Perhaps it’s a need to diversify your revenue or customer base. Maybe it’s something being pushed by your board, or a suggestion from the leadership team to capitalize on your momentum and desire to become a global leader.

No matter what the catalyst is for these conversations, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea of a new opportunity and hard to take a step back and think: “Is this the right time?” or “What is the optimum pace?” So, how do you know when you’re ready to expand? There is rarely a black and white answer to this question, but consider the following questions:

Are you currently thriving in your home base? Is your business stable?
Have you passed a critical size in your home country?
Do you have a strong leadership team and culture in place to be a foundation for other regions?
Do you have the necessary financial resources or capital to expand?
Do you have commitment from your board and broader management team to make the leap?

If you can answer yes to most or all of these questions, it may be a good time to make the move.

Are you prepared for the risks?

As you undertake international expansion, there are many challenges that could impede your success. It’s imperative that you think through each of these challenges and work solutions into your strategy and plans. Here are a few of the barriers and risks that come up time and again:

Financial costs. Don’t underestimate the lead time and investment needed to start and build a presence in a new country. You will need at minimum an in-country team to handle the customer-facing roles (e.g. consulting leaders, sales, project managers and/or solution architects) while you leverage the rest of your organization to deliver projects. It takes time to hire your local presence and time to ramp up a minimum billability.
Cultural impact. In a people-based business, few things matter more than culture. While there may be certain cultural nuances based on the region you are in and the region you are planning to enter, there should be some consistency in how your employees, customers and partners interact with your company. To ensure your culture feeds into your new locations, you’ll want to have a set of guiding principles and processes that in-country leaders and employees can use to ensure your culture is performing, regardless of location.
Management distraction. You need your leaders to be focused on your business, and expanding into new markets will naturally create distractions for your management team. One way to mitigate this is by following a fractal growth pattern, expanding country-by-country and building off existing practice areas or IP rather than trying to open too many countries at once or launching a completely new service line in a new country.
Talent sourcing. You will not establish yourself in a new market without the right leadership and team. If your company doesn’t have an established brand in the market, recruiting the right talent won’t be easy. How will you mitigate this? Will you lift and shift current team members to a new market, or pay to hire a local recruiter? If you move existing team members, how will they work within the region’s cultural norms and languages?

Do you have the right strategy to be successful?

Once you understand the risks, it’s time to create a plan for success. Below are four areas that will help you develop a successful expansion strategy, and at the same time, create an effective business case to get buy-in from your board and stakeholders.

Align with your technology partners

Most services businesses rely heavily on technology partnerships. If that’s the case for your business, which it probably is, the first thing you want to do when developing your international strategy is to align with your primary technology partners or Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).

Here are some questions to consider:

What countries/regions are your ISV partners in today? What is their growth in those regions?
How established are they in these markets?
How strong are they at sales and marketing? Do they need a partner to help them bring in business, or is their biggest need on the service delivery side?
How open or closed is your ISV’s partner ecosystem? Do they welcome new entrants to an ecosystem, or do they prefer to curate their partners? How controlling are they with who gets access to their sales teams and customers in the region?
What certifications will you need to be marketable in the region?
How supportive are they about you entering a particular market?

This last question is especially important. If the country GM and sales leadership for your primary partner isn’t supportive of you entering their region, it is going to be an uphill battle. They need to see how you can help their interests in the region, and know the unique value you bring to their sales team and customer base that others can’t.

Assess the market opportunities

To ensure there is room for your services to thrive within a given country or region, you need to start by evaluating the maturity of different markets, the opportunity in each market and the competition that currently exists there.

Here are a few questions to help with your due diligence:

What is the market’s size, maturity and growth rate?
How saturated is the market today?
How receptive are your partners and customers to you operating in a given market?
How easy is it to enter that market (e.g. language, timezone, understanding of the local culture)
Would your entry reshuffle the ecosystem in the targeted country?
Does this create possible tactical strategies which could create new opportunities and/or de-risk your entry, such as partnering with local Global System Integrators or local management consulting firms?

Consider organizing your expansion by “classes” of countries and then map out your pace. How many can you expand into at once? Some companies will want to enter a market as soon as their technology partners begin to gain any traction there, while others might prefer to wait until there is a bigger customer base to serve. There are risks in each approach. If you go in too early, you may need to invest more time and capital to build demand alongside your partner. If you wait, you risk letting competitors build up competencies and become that valued partner. Again, there may be no perfect answer or time, but it’s important to talk through these risks with your leadership team.

Refine your tactical approach

Having a clear, compelling and consistent value proposition is important for any business, but it becomes especially important when recruiting a new team and establishing yourself with a new set of customers and partners. Start by remembering what made you successful in your home country in the first place – qualities like your founding team’s credentials, your culture, your team’s unique skills and expertise, track record of success, customer network and ability to deliver results fast.

From there, outline how you’ll differentiate your business in this new market and what partners and customers value the most. You’ll want to combine your market analysis with an understanding of your strengths, and build a value proposition that reflects this combination. What intellectual property or potential sales assets can you bring over to this new region, and what you might need to rebuild? Can you localize a preconfigured solution for a specific vertical market or bring an accelerator that is non existent in your new target market?

Refining your approach to this new market requires having an understanding of the customers in that market, not just based on assumptions. There may be an entirely new set of regulations or operating norms for businesses in that region that you aren’t aware of. It might help to start small, by targeting a certain segment of customers or industries where you can leverage your existing references and credentials or launching only a subset of your services portfolio.

Develop your country playbook

Once you are certain you’re ready to expand, have narrowed in on the country or countries you know hold the greatest chance for success, have aligned with partners, and have a basic understanding of how you’ll approach the expansion, it’s time to start building your operating model.

I call this your country playbook, and it’s essentially a documented framework that lays out what you’re trying to achieve for the business at a country level. It’s a more detailed plan for how you will execute in a new market that ensures that you, the teams in your existing home base, and your country leader are fully aligned.

In my next post, I dig deeper into how to create a country playbook, the areas it should address and how it can help you create a consistent, repeatable process for international expansion.

The case for verticalizing your cloud services portfolio

April 28, 2021 by Hiral Chandrana Leave a Comment

We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly specialized, from how we consume information, to the brands we buy, to the resiliency in supply chains. This has become increasingly true post-pandemic as companies look to adapt and transform their business models. That focus on specialization is happening in cloud computing as well.

Industry-aligned cloud solutions and companies are taking the market by storm, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the same is happening in cloud-focused professional services, where combining business process and industry expertise is critical to deliver innovations faster. If you are a cloud IT services firm who doesn’t have an industry-driven approach in your portfolio, you may be ignoring a critical path to delivering sustainable value to your customers.

If you are a cloud IT services firm who doesn’t have an industry-driven approach in your portfolio, you may be ignoring a critical path to delivering sustainable value to your customers.

In its 2021 State of the Cloud report, Bessemer Venture Partners predicts that “the vertical SaaS wave will become a tsunami” in the coming year. Veeva, a cloud-based CRM company focused on the life sciences industry, is perhaps the most cited example. With nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenue, Veeva continues to grow 33% year over year. Brightwheel, Procore, Majesco are just a few other vertically oriented SaaS companies. The larger cloud platforms (e.g. Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, AWS) have also been placing a larger emphasis on verticals over the past decade.

During the first two waves of cloud computing, software providers focused on building out their underlying platforms, leaving it to services partners and clients to customize and integrate them into industry-specific business processes. That worked well, but it leaves customers to finish the job — to manage and evolve those platforms to serve a business that is always changing.

In the cloud’s third wave, customers are looking for more help guiding them in the context of their business. That need is accentuated in regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services and government agencies that have specialized security requirements and risks. For example, a digital healthcare solution may require an operational transformation, analytics and workflow redesign, but it also needs a deep understanding of what patient/clinician engagement looks like across the value chain and how that aligns with HIPAA compliance.

Breaking the horizontal mindset

Specializing in one or two verticals is a smart move for almost any cloud-driven services firm. Unfortunately, many have been slow to adopt an industry-focused approach for a couple of underlying reasons. First is the assumption that you need to be at scale to verticalize. Many companies think they’re too small or simply don’t have the resources to do it well. The second revolves around fear. Fear that it requires significant effort without immediate ROI, or that they might pick the wrong industry, or that it will limit them in some way.

Let’s start with the scale issue. When consultancies get started, many begin with a more general approach to build their customer base and reputation with channel partners. The natural inclination for many founders, especially those who are technologists rather than industry experts, is to build up the firm around a specific platform or technical capability, rather than specializing in an industry. However with a generic approach, differentiation starts to diminish over time as more partners enter a space and there is a risk for services to be commoditized.

However with a generic approach, differentiation starts to diminish over time as more partners enter a space and there is a risk for services to be commoditized.

An interesting case study for verticalizing a portfolio is Onica, a cloud specialist in Amazon Web Services (AWS) consulting and managed services, which was a spin-off from a larger IT services firm. It delivered cloud migrations, big data and cloud-native development with a razor-sharp focus on AWS, but in parallel, also strengthened its competency in industrial and manufacturing oriented solutions with IoT and AWS. Onica was <$50 million at one point when it started focusing on industry solutions and grew 800% from 2016 to 2018. In late 2019, it was acquired by Rackspace for $323 million.

To alleviate initial fears, a vertical approach doesn’t have to be big-bang. A lesson from the above case study is the approach can be incremental and complementary to what a firm is already doing. For example, it may make sense to start with an industry-specific accelerator that speeds delivery or sets you apart in your go-to-market. Cloud vendors have made it a lot easier to create vertical IP and reusable assets by architecting their platforms to be more open and accessible. Or instead of building organically, consider a tuck-in M&A transaction to get the industry vertical expertise needed.

The bottom line is you no longer need the scale and resources of an Accenture or Deloitte to have a vertical play. It’s less about size, and more about having focus, picking the right vertical and partner(s) for that industry, and having confidence in your strategy.

When it comes to developing the right strategy, here are five areas where I recommend focusing your efforts: 1) Target your industry bets; 2) Align with your partners; 3) Co-create with customers; 4) Innovate at the intersections; 5) Tie your strategy to execution.

Target your Industry bets

Not all industries are created equal — like people they come in different sizes, and have different requirements, and not all will be the right match for you. The traditional approach is to look at the Total Addressable Market (TAM). David Kidder, CEO of Bionic and author of the book “New to Big” instead suggests looking at the Total Addressable Problem (TAP). According to David, “the TAP model is based on discovering brand new customer problems or uncovering new untapped markets and that can lead to exponential growth.”

The TAP model, disruptive trends, unique expertise, and industry micro-segmentation should all play a role in finalizing your industry bets. The goal shouldn’t just be to have an offering in the space, it’s to be positioned within the top three service providers for that particular vertical or micro-vertical.

Start by looking at your unique expertise, and the verticals or micro-verticals that are a fit for that expertise. A great example of this is Snowflake, the cloud data platform that allows businesses to unlock insight from data. Snowflake’s financial services solution provides a strict approach for security and regulatory compliance that can be tailored to the needs of customers in banking, insurance, or mortgages. It is the services partner’s role to implement, integrate and amplify the solution.

If you’re a cloud services firm aligned to Snowflake helping clients monetize the large amounts of data being generated in financial services industries, don’t stop at banking or insurance. Instead specialize further in micro-verticals such as consumer finance, commercial banking, life insurance or property & casualty insurance. Or think through how you can help clients create new fintech offerings that take advantage of the disruptions happening in eCommerce and cryptocurrency.

The TAP model, disruptive trends, unique expertise, and industry micro-segmentation should all play a role in finalizing your industry bets. The goal shouldn’t just be to have an offering in the space, it’s to be positioned within the top three service providers for that particular vertical or micro-vertical.

Align with your partners

The partner ecosystems for large cloud platforms have grown substantially in the last two decades. Salesforce alone has more than 1,600 services partners around the world. As cloud vendors look to expand market share, they are looking to consultancies to create industry-specific solutions that add stickiness to their platforms. To differentiate in an increasingly crowded space, more and more early-stage services firms are now leaning in on a vertical orientation.

If you are a service provider focused on a particular vendor’s platform, it’s important to understand that vendor’s vertical strategy. In most cases, they probably have one. If not, perhaps that’s an opportunity to add value or fill a gap in their go-to-market strategy. What industry roadmap has the cloud platform provider laid out for growth? How does that align with your strengths, customer base or future bets?

When ServiceNow first announced their industry bets, they started with financial services and telecom. As ServiceNow grew from IT service management to customer/employee workflows to AIOps, it has continued to build on its domain capabilities. The company now specializes in more than 10 industries, from healthcare to public sector to manufacturing to retail and logistics. In a statement last year, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said, “by creating industry-specific solutions, delivered through a partner-led model, we can better address the unique challenges that companies in key vertical markets face.”

Co-create with customers

Picking one or two anchor customers can make a big difference in how quickly you can gain traction with a vertical strategy, and the positive reference that will help you get the next set of case studies and references. You might start with an existing customer or identify a customer to pursue in parallel with your vendor partner.

By working hand in hand with customers you will avoid the classic trap of a solution looking for a problem. The bottom line, make the customer part of the solution.

Whether you’re working alongside your cloud vendor partner or directly with the client, attach yourself to a strategic and well funded program. Many companies have roles solely focused on future innovations, titles such as Chief Digital Officer or Chief Growth Officer. Find a customer willing to wade into uncharted territories with you and co-create some intellectual property for an industry problem that hasn’t been solved or is just emerging.

Innovate at intersections

There will always be historic and economic events, such as the financial recession or recent pandemic, that drive new levels of innovation, but smaller disruptions shift markets all the time. It’s important to be on the lookout for signals and trends while betting on the future. For example, renowned futurist Amy Webb recently released the 2021 Emerging Tech Trends report and talks about health care as the next battleground for big-tech and how drone delivery will disrupt transportation & logistics industries.

Also, industry lines are blurring. This can be seen in retail solutions that create a connected consumer experience across various points in the shopper journey, or a media solution that engage audiences across channels, or a solution that provides banking customers with a consistent streamlined experience across different interactions. There is a lot to leverage across industries and in some cases it might make sense to build your differentiation/IP around a business process that cuts across 2-3 different industries. A classic success story is Adobe’s experience platform that can be tailored to provide personalized marketing solutions across various industries.

In the Salesforce economy, several services partners have focused on a cross-section of business processes like Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) or eCommerce. In this example, partners could take it one step further and create a differentiated solution for B2B industries (e.g. manufacturing or hi-tech) where CPQ and commerce are integrated to drive business outcomes across the “Quote to Cash” value chain.

Whether it’s between industries, between business processes, or between technologies, innovation is amplified at the intersections.

We’re also seeing firms create use cases that incorporate and integrate big data, automation, or the disruptive application of 5G and AI across industries to differentiate. Whether it’s between industries, between business processes, or between technologies, innovation is amplified at the intersections.

Tie strategy to execution

Tying strategy to execution seems rather intuitive, but too many companies don’t go deep enough when laying out how they are going to be successful in this new space. An effective vertical strategy requires more than some IP or people with relevant skills. It requires an understanding of the unique sales and procurement processes within the industry, and an effective customer engagement model with top notch resources. How should your Go-to-Market plans (GTM) change, and what people and processes do you need to have in place, to pivot to a vertical focus?

Once you know that, find the right talent to build into that customer engagement model. In many cases, you might need to hire outside experts. People who have lived and worked in that industry, who understand the unique nuances, terminology, challenges, and opportunities in the space. In some cases, you might already have the right people and just need to cross train them through shadow or train the trainer programs.

As you progress and gain more customers in a given industry, or expand into new ones, you can grow your IP and build your team accordingly. Be prepared that results will not come overnight, but once you tie your holistic strategy to the execution plan, the potential upside can be exponential with the right bets and partnerships.

Conclusion

Taking a verticalized approach to a services portfolio isn’t a new concept. Large software companies have been pushing their services partners in this direction for more than a decade, and as cloud vendors mature they are following suit.

To compete in this market, third wave cloud consultancies will need to specialize in some way. While some may specialize in specific platform capabilities or at business process intersections, many can do it through an industry approach. In some cases, a hybrid strategy might be best. Whatever your strategy is today, you should be experimenting. You must be willing to work a year or likely more with the right investments before you see real ROI. You’re learning through the process, creating assets, repeatable practices, refining capabilities, etc.

To compete in this market, third wave cloud consultancies will need to specialize in some way. While some may specialize in specific platform capabilities or at business process intersections, many can do it through an industry approach.

A final thought: it’s good to start your journey with the end in mind, but remember, in the end, it is the journey that will matter. To be successful in the third wave of cloud, you will have to adapt quickly along the way, integrate new cloud technologies and business models to drive digital innovations for your clients. A salute to the non-profit organizations who worked tirelessly through the pandemic to protect and save lives.

Tercera’s best practices, playbooks and growth capital may be able to guide your success in this competitive environment, where differentiation now is more critical than ever. If you think Tercera can help, send the team a message here.

Tercera adds two new partners

April 8, 2021 by Tercera Team Leave a Comment

Former Guggenheim Partners Investment Banker Bill Petty, and Former Appirio CX and Marketing Leader Michelle Swan Join the Tercera Team

EVERYWHERE – April 8, 2021 – Tercera, a growth-focused investment and advisory firm specializing in technology professional services, today announced that Bill Petty and Michelle Swan have joined the firm as partners. Together, they bring decades of IT services experience to help Tercera drive forward the Third Wave of cloud computing. Bill and Michelle join Tercera CEO and founder Chris Barbin, partner Dan Lascell and partner Lisa Burton to support the firm’s investments in third wave cloud consultancies.

“Our goal at Tercera is to identify and empower the integrators, consultancies, and managed service providers who will lead the next wave of innovation,” said Chris Barbin, founder and CEO of Tercera. “Bill and Michelle have built, ran, advised and supported dozens of services companies over the last 20 years, and they bring pattern recognition for the opportunities and challenges our founders will experience as they scale their own business. They embody our mission and values, and will be invaluable partners to the entrepreneurs we back.”

About Bill

Bill brings more than 15 years of M&A experience to Tercera and will focus on the sourcing, execution and monitoring of Tercera’s investments. He joins Tercera from Guggenheim Partners where he was a Managing Director in the Technology Investment Banking Group. Prior to Guggenheim, Bill held investment banking roles with William Blair and City Capital Advisors and worked in KPMG’s Transaction Services Group. He has advised dozens of technology companies across the IT Services and Software markets on topics ranging from M&A, growth equity investments and IPOs. More on Bill here.

“Tercera is creating a new kind of investment firm, focused on the people that enable the third wave of cloud computing,” said Bill. “We are excited to partner with the founders and teams driving the next-gen IT services firms, and are confident that our counsel, connections and capital can help them become category defining leaders.”

About Michelle

Michelle brings to Tercera more than 20 years of branding, marketing and customer experience expertise. She will be responsible for guiding Tercera’s marketing, content and diversity & inclusion initiatives, the Tercera advisor and portfolio community experience, and helping founders amplify their own brand presence. Prior to joining Tercera, she founded and led Swancomm, a marketing communications consultancy supporting early stage product and services companies. Michelle was one of the earliest employees at Appirio, where she led corporate marketing, customer experience and initiated the company’s Customer Advisory Board. More on Michelle here.

“People-based businesses are the heart and soul of the economy, and the secret to success for some of the most well known technology companies out there. Yet they rarely get the attention and support they deserve. We aim to change that,” said Michelle.

About Tercera
Tercera is an investment and advisory firm founded to accelerate the growth of people-centric businesses. Specializing in the $460 billion cloud professional services market, the Tercera team is composed of invested operators who know first-hand what it takes to build and scale a successful cloud services business. Tercera (Spanish for ‘third’) is on a mission to identify the people and partners who will lead the next wave of cloud computing – the Third Wave – and provide them with the capital, counsel and connections they need to scale faster and take an outsized share of the market.

How services firms can architect a successful alliances program to fuel growth

March 17, 2021 by Gary Rinedollar Leave a Comment

If you were to ask a founder or CEO of a successful professional services firm what’s her or his secret to growth, most will say something along the lines of “hiring the right people” or “building a great company culture” or, for the more humble, “being in the right place at the right time.” Few would say “picking the right partners.” However, hitching your wagon to the right technology partners and building a mutually beneficial relationship with those partners, can mean the difference between growth and hyper-growth.

Having spent more than two decades leading sales, business development and M&A at product and services companies from HP to Appirio, I can tell you from first-hand experience that partnerships are the fuel for company growth.

Alliances help in so many areas. They can grow revenue by attracting new customers or broadening a company’s offerings. They can make you stickier inside an existing client, or help expand brand awareness and market presence. They can round out areas where you are weak (or where customers perceive you’re weak), and even speed time to market through joint innovation.

Unfortunately, too many companies treat their partnerships and alliances program in an ad hoc way, rather than as a strategic function of the business. Perhaps this is why 60-70% of partnerships fail to achieve what they set out to do. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. With the right strategy, selection criteria, structure, and success processes in place – what I call the four S’s – alliances can contribute greatly to your bottom line.

Craft Your Alliances Strategy

Whether you’re starting with a clean slate or have some partnerships in place (which is more often the case in my experience), you need a strategy.

Any good partner strategy starts with a strong understanding and alignment with your company goals and go-to market strategy. For example, is your goal to expand your market presence or build brand awareness? Or to broaden your product and services offerings? Or to shore up some perceived weaknesses?

If it’s to expand your market presence you’ll need to do due diligence and prioritize which markets to target, evaluate if a referral, reseller, OEM & distribution model fits your needs, estimate the resources required to support these channels and build a short list of potential partners.

If your goal is to become a specific technology or platform vendor’s top implementation or solution partner (or perhaps eventually be acquired by that vendor), your strategy might be to go all in on that one company.

If your goal is to be the leading systems integrator for a specific area (e.g. security, data analytics, IoT) or a specific industry (e.g. healthcare or financial services), your strategy might be to create partnerships across the entire stack of tech vendors within that space.

One example of this strategy in practice is BeyondID, a managed identity services provider in the identity access management (IAM) and cybersecurity space. BeyondID began by focusing on Okta, the leading cloud identity platform in the $55B identity market, managing some of their largest customers. The company has since formed partnerships with other cybersecurity and cloud vendors, expanding into new areas and revenue streams. Okta’s $6.5B acquisition of AuthO, an identity platform for application developers, opens up yet another opportunity.

No matter how many partnerships a company chooses to pursue — and I would argue that less is more — it’s important to remember all partnerships are not created equal. They can and should vary widely in importance, from those that you happen to interact with on a regular basis to those that are foundational to your corporate strategy.

Select the Right Partners for Your Strategy

Now that you’ve aligned your partner strategy with your company goals and go-to-market objectives, the next step is to find the right partners to help you meet those goals. Just like with employees, selecting the right partner(s) will set you on the right path.

First, define the criteria (internal and external) for your ideal partner. Here are a few questions to get you started:

How does the partnership fit within your corporate strategy?
How does the partnership align with your growth objectives?
How can the partnership expand or complement your current capabilities/offerings?
What is the partner’s position in the competitive landscape?
What is the partner’s geographic coverage & focus?
How mature is their partner ecosystem?
What level of support is the partner prepared to provide?

If you already have partnerships in place, review those existing relationships based on these criteria. What’s working, what’s not?

When identifying prospective partners, you want to pick clear leaders in their category. Start with a short list of three to four (unless there’s already a clear winner), and then do some diligence. This will take time but, trust me, it will be worth the effort.

Here are a few things I look for in the diligence process:

Are they a leader in their category as defined by revenue, marketshare, or analyst quadrants?
What is the partner’s total addressable market?
What is the partner’s growth rate?
Can I meet my growth/revenue goals in this ecosystem?
How crowded is their partner ecosystem with competitive companies/offerings?
Is there whitespace where my company can differentiate and be successful in the ecosystem?
Will my services rate structure/product pricing model be competitive in their market?
Do I have, or can I build executive alignment/relationships?
Is the partner willing to co-invest in the partnership?

The diligence process is meant to narrow down your choices, and to make sure you’re aligning with a partner that can bring real value to your company and customers. But from there it’s a courtship, with each side getting a sense for what it would be like to live together. These early discussions with partners are a chance to see if your values align, to get a feel for how they’d treat your customers and employees, and to more fully understand what they’re looking for out of the relationship. Like any marriage, you want to be with someone who sees value in what you bring to the table and will treat you with respect.

A partnership might not always be equal, but it should be balanced.

Consider a Three-Tiered Alliance Structure

A well-defined partner structure signals both internally and externally which partners are most important to your strategy. Too often I see partner pages littered with a large number of logos. In an attempt to illustrate market dominance and coverage, this to me just screams, “We really don’t have a partnering strategy, so let’s throw up a bunch of logos and hope for the best.”

What is meant to be a benefit to the company ends up being a distraction. Sales doesn’t know what to sell, marketing isn’t investing in the highest return campaigns, and delivery teams and/or engineering teams find themselves spending precious resources on solutions that will never be implemented. In the end, a lot of corporate calories are expended with little return.

One way to bring some structure and prioritize your partnerships is in a three-tiered system, organized like a pyramid.

At the top are your truly strategic alliances. This could be just two or three partners, but they are the ones your whole company will invest in. Sales and marketing teams will partner with them on key accounts and campaigns, engineering teams will collaborate on solutions, delivery teams will be trained on how to engage, etc. Strategic partners should be an integral part of your team, and will probably stick around longer than your biggest customers.

Next are solution partnerships, the ones that complement your strategics in some way and help you bring a more comprehensive solution to your customers. You’ll potentially have a few more of these than your top level strategic partners, but the number might still be fairly low. There will be investments made here, but not at the same level as with your strategics.

At the bottom of the pyramid are ecosystem partnerships, which might include dozens of companies. These are the partners that fill in a gap, are relevant in some way to your customer base or contribute to your go-to-market strategy. You’ll have to take a hard look at how to invest with these partners, if at all, but be clear about who they are and where they fit in the strategy. Sometimes they will graduate up into a higher level partnership, but in some cases they might remain just a small component of your larger offering.

There should be a different playbook for each level of partnership, and executives and employees should be aligned on their level of importance. Without that prioritization and alignment, you’ll end up with empty agreements that don’t add value, or teams wasting precious time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

Manage Your Joint Success

Alliances don’t manage themselves. They take time to nurture, structure to be effective, and ongoing focus and commitment to really see results. McKinsey has done some great research into what makes a successful joint partnership.

When it comes to managing the success of your partnerships, it helps to consider where your company is in its lifecycle. Small, early-stage services firms may utilize the crowd swarming methodology to partner management where the executives ‘own’ the relationship and spread the other functional relationship components off to sales, marketing, and delivery. This works for a while, but with senior leaders in start-ups wearing multiple hats, effectively managing these partners can either become a distraction (especially if there are multiple partners) or it doesn’t get the attention it requires. This can be especially true with large strategic partners. While these companies may accelerate your pipeline quickly, they can also drown you with activity. They may outnumber you by 1000:1 and may have a different sense of time and urgency.

Services companies that want to gain traction with large strategics and/or that are later in their lifecycle with more capital, should consider bringing on a dedicated alliances lead to add some method to the madness. Look for an alliances lead with a strong sales background who can help prioritize the organization’s resources and focus on driving business.

As the number of partners and activity grows, you’ll likely need to add additional alliances resources. One way to think about these hires is to do a value assessment of an additional sales headcount versus an additional alliances headcount. There are definitely scenarios where an additional alliances headcount with the go-to-market leverage of a strategic partner will drive significantly more pipeline than a more costly field sales person.

In closing, like any relationship, partnerships aren’t easy, but they are incredibly rewarding. For services firms, they really should be a core competency. If you find yourself without a well thought out plan in this area, or a website full of partner logos that are contributing little to nothing to your bottom line, I hope this guidance helps. If not, it might be time to seek some counseling from a professional.