Uncovering behind-the-deal dynamics of marketplace success with Brennan Lynch

00:00
Brian Lawrence
Welcome everyone to the Clazaar podcast. I'm Brian Lawrence, your host today with my friend Brennan lynch from Cyberark. Brennan, how are you doing, man? 

00:09
Brennan Lynch
I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me. 

00:12
Brian Lawrence
Of course. So you're the director of global marketplaces over at Cyberark and you are on the cutting edge of working with the cloud marketplaces. You've had some amazing success and you're an expert in channel programs and leadership as well. So excited to have you. But would you mind sharing a little bit more about your own background and a little of what Cyberark does for our viewing audience? 

00:37
Brennan Lynch
Yeah, happy to do so. I've been in cyber security and tech sales for 25 years now. I started out actually working for a reseller, then went into channels and channel leadership, did some enterprise sales work and then back into some more channel development. I've worked with all the indirect route to market models that there's possible msp, GSI alliances. A couple years ago. Not a couple. Gosh, now it's been many years ago, I saw the cloud marketplace places starting to proliferate. 

01:14
Brian Lawrence
Right. 

01:14
Brennan Lynch
And, and I thought, man, if I was still an enterprise seller, that's how I'd want to transact all my stuff. And so I leaned in hard to that and have been devoting my career to that ever since. Right. And leveraging the cloud service providers and it's been a wonderful ride. You know, had a great trip here at Cyberark and loved, you know, looking forward to continuing it Cyberark, you know, being the global leader in identity security and access management and also certificate management. Certificate management has become very important, especially for Kubernetes, which is, you know, got an incredible adoption rate. Right. And for us it's a great space, it's a great area because we enable cloud adoption, we enable cloud access, we support Kubernetes and secure cluster development. So it's a great space to work with, right? 

02:12
Brian Lawrence
It is. And you know, one of the things that I saw, Gartner had mentioned a while back that like 75% of orgs were looking at security vendor consolidation. Instead of having a whole bunch of points, they're moving towards consolidation and having that unified solution. What are you seeing there with your own customers and maybe how marketplace like helps with that type of consolidation. Is that something that you're seeing? 

02:39
Brennan Lynch
Yeah, I mean, you know, depending on the customer and the company. Right. The, the isv and if there's a reseller involved. Right. And everybody's particular protocols, you could essentially do a deal transaction through a cloud service provider and not be an authorized partner or vendor at the customer because the contract is with the cloud service provider. So when you think about sales cycle utilization, how much of your sales cycle is being taken up by contracting, how much is it be taken up by becoming an authorized vendor? Right. Moving that to zero is great because the older dad, right, time kills deals. So if you can improve your sales cycle time to, you know, time to close, they're more likely to get the deal. And that's just kind of bullet point one of sort of the value story that I see with cloud service providers. 

03:41
Brennan Lynch
And, and I, I say this often. I said anytime I do talks. This is a finance story. This is a story about numbers. This is a story about improving numbers, leveraging economies of scale. This isn't a story about happier people, nicer people, better people, we don't care. This is a story about numbers. This is a finance story. 

04:04
Brian Lawrence
Talking to a cfo. And I mean, I think when you think about a CFO who's looking at a bunch of vendors and saying to the team, hey, we want to consolidate, we want to save money. That's the environment we're in. And if Cyberark is on AWS and able to leverage that relationship and do things through Marketplace, then some of your competitors aren't there. I imagine that's a pretty big competitive advantage. And to your point about, hey, this isn't like, who's that, who has the cutest looking background and you know, interface, but rather it's driven by numbers. And so Cyberark being on Marketplace compared to competitors who might not be, it seems like that's a pretty big competitive advantage when you're talking about numbers and finance and that type of thing. 

04:49
Brennan Lynch
It definitely is a strong competitive advantage, you know, and it's a value point to the customer. Right. Does the client have available spend with their cloud service provider and are they looking to consume some of that spend and purchasing third party ISV goods and services? If the answers are yes, and you have the ability to transact through a cloud service provider and your competitor doesn't, then you're fulfilling the financial needs of that customer better than your next closest competitor who cannot transact through a cloud service provider. 

05:31
Brian Lawrence
Yep. And I find a lot of times that the conversation being driven by the sales account exec or whoever, that's actually something that they can help crack open because maybe the company who's buying isn't even thinking about cloud marketplaces. A possible opportunity, but then like you ask a couple questions and they're kind of like this aha moment where they're like, oh, we can transact with you via the cloud marketplace. Is that something you've invested a lot in at Cyberark in terms of training the sales team and helping them unlock that and having those conversations? Or is it more reactive that the CFO of one of your customers will mention it? Which do you see and how are you thinking about that and what's been the investment in training and supporting your own sales team? 

06:18
Brennan Lynch
I would say that the CFO is oftentimes a very high level conversation for an enterprise, you know, deal. So we're not always at that CFO level, nor is anybody else really. Right. Unless you're doing almost a, A, a financial document, you know, size deal. Right. You know, but if you're doing a very strong deal, you're going to be up at the cio, you know, who's controlling budgets, right. You're going to be at, you know, maybe head of procurement, you know, head of the CISO dependence that they have any budget tied to it. Right. And they're going to be thinking about the sort of the global instances. Right. And I've written about it in an article on my LinkedIn profile about how at some point I think the cloud service provider spend initiative is going to be a financial document, you know, viable spend. 

07:17
Brennan Lynch
It's going to be a line item. Right. How are we doing on that spend and are we proliferating it across the country? Right. It's not just IT tools and services per se for the IT department. You can buy your HR software through there, you can buy your marketing software through there. Right. You can buy services through there. And, and I think at some point the larger companies are going to have, you know, a head of essentially cloud procurement. Right. Someone who's there to maximize their cloud service provider spend agreements. And so, you know, I look at it from that perspective. You know, oftentimes maybe the IT resource, your advocate, your technical advocate, the person who gave you the technical win, they're not going to have that sort of visibility right into this. 

08:12
Brennan Lynch
You know, they want their technology, they want their solution, they want to make their job easier. That's great. You might ask them some very simple questions like who is your cloud service provider? Right. Which ones do you leverage? Oh, I leveraged aws, I leveraged Azure, I leveraged gcp. Right. Who's your primary, who's your backup? Okay, great. Who managed? Who Helps manage those relationships. Who, who owns engaging with them. Great. You know, and talk to that resource. It's probably like, oh, the CIO deals with them or you know, the VP of IT Ops deals with them. Oh, cool. Those are the ones that talk to them and say, hey, do you have a spend agreement with them? Are you using a consumption initiative with them? Are. Have you met it or you know, can you. 

09:04
Brennan Lynch
Would you like to transact this deal through a cloud service provider? We've literally had deals go 10x when they pivoted from a traditional route to market to a cloud service provider. And that's incredible. Right? And just the speed and agility that they close. But the idea is to ask super simple questions and realize that your technical advocate is not necessarily going to be the right resource to speak to about leveraging cloud service provider. The other thing is, you know, reaching out to your mirrors at the cloud service providers. So engaging your sellers with the cloud service provider sellers on specific accounts. So hey, you went in, you talked to XYZ company, they said, hey, you know, we don't know anything about that, but we do have a Azure Mac, right? Great, you go, you work with your team. 

10:05
Brennan Lynch
Depending on how you've structured, we've structured our organization so that it's very fluid and very easy to connect with sellers at cloud service providers. We have intermediaries in between that. That's their whole job. And you connect with say the cloud service provider account manager or the ISV success manager there or whatever sort of term they use. This this year, everybody changes their terms every year on what their job does at a cloud service provider. And you engage them and say, hey, look, we just had a conversation with xyz. They said that they're a consumer of yours. Help me understand, you know, the relationship. What are you guys doing there? We have a project, we're working. Would that be, would that be available to leverage their cloud cons, you know, the cloud infrastructure spend. Right. 

10:58
Brennan Lynch
And kind of get some guidance from them as well and then also leverage them to get access to resources. Hey, they said that, you know, their IT Ops VP is the one who runs it. Gave me this name. Any chance you can make an introduction for me? Right. Leverage those guys to help you move around in the account and to find money. 

11:23
Brian Lawrence
And you know, you've pointed out in the past and I've loved this, the, just the kind of the math of enlisting the sales team from the hyperscalers and just, you know, I mean, one of the things I think about is like, hey, Mike Lazar sales team is a fraction of the size of some of my competitors. And yet even my competitors, they're a fraction of like that AWS sales team. I think last I saw was like 18,000 sellers. And so what is. And you know, hey you, when you look at like the lever of how can I utilize those 18,000 sellers on my behalf and you talked about some of them, they're not going to sell your tech for you, but they can help you identify your money, where the money is. 

12:09
Brian Lawrence
We also know that those 18,000 sellers at AWS and the ones at Azure and the ones at gcp, they got a whole lot of people trying to get in front of them and trying to get their attention. What are the best ways you've seen and maybe what are some of the do's and do nots of how do you successfully partner with those sellers to get that additional leverage? 

12:29
Brennan Lynch
Yeah, I think the high level is how does your tech enable cloud adoption? How do you help support cloud adoption? Do you have something that provides secure access to cloud adoption? Do you have something that speeds up cloud adoption? Do you have something that creates efficiencies from data lakes? Do you have integrations with specific technologies that are really exceptional? Are you part of a blueprint framework for an ideal cloud environment for some reason? Have your narratives, your high level narratives absolutely available. And then also show good numbers if you register opportunities, register significant amount of opportunities with them. Right. And then have good launch metrics. You know, if you're registering opportunities, make sure you launch the ones you close, whether or not they close through the marketplace or not. And then, you know, transact deals through marketplace. Right. 

13:31
Brennan Lynch
They want to go to market with someone that they know is going to help them meet their quota. Right. And if they look at you and they have full telemetry, full, you know, back end on you as far as how you look to them from a cloud service provider. Go to market standpoint and they look at you or your comments that, yeah, this one's got a great, great ratios. They do a fair amount through marketplace. I will definitely lean in. They're going to help me make my quota. They're looking at the, at essentially looking at their opportunity cost and playing the odds. 

14:08
Brian Lawrence
Yep. 

14:08
Brennan Lynch
Right. If I spend time with this ISV and not this other isv, what's the likelihood that this one is going to help me get to my marketplace number? And, and you know, many of the cloud service provider sales reps now are getting a larger share of their on target earnings. Their variable comp is focused on transactions through marketplace, you know, not just their own individual cloud service provider tools and tech, not just what used to be, you know, hey, we're going to get some bucket filled just by helping some ISV out who registered an opportunity with us and didn't even transact it through marketplace. Right, right. Those fun days for them of, you know, printing money on the easy side are gone. And, and you know, but there's 10,000 sellers at any cloud service provider. 10,000 ISVs who want to be relevant. 

15:09
Brian Lawrence
Yeah. 

15:10
Brennan Lynch
So you have to know how to be relevant. You have to have your narrative, you know, down in simple terms. 

15:17
Brian Lawrence
Yeah. And I think it comes back to like what you said of, you know, those sellers are calculating odds and placing bets. It's probably why so many sales kickoffs are in Vegas. Right. You know, sellers. Yeah, but you know, sellers are coin operated. Right. And so they're going to go where the money is. And so if you're able to help them understand how you're going to help them make money, they're gonna be a lot more responsive. Is that kind of what it boils down to? 

15:46
Brennan Lynch
Yeah, I mean it goes back to my narrative before, like this is a finance story. This is a story about numbers. Right. And you know, the great thing about these 18,000 sellers or however many, you know, AWS and however many Azure has. Right. There's thousands of them. There's a multitude more than say you probably have at your isv. Right. Is, is, you know, this is where the money is and these are the guys who can help you find the money. And sometimes these guys are managing spend initiatives at the client at one single client. That's probably more than your company does in the entire year of bookings, right? Yeah. Could you imagine talking to some guys who spend initiative with one client is more than your company's total revenue for the entire year? 

16:36
Brennan Lynch
For all the deals you ever did, this I think about, man, if I was on, if I was a kid on the playground and I wanted to go play, you know, rugby or just some sort of ridiculous kid game and I was a little guy, who am I gonna choose? Am I gonna choose a bunch of other little guys like me to go get mowed over? No, I'm gonna choose all the big guys. I'm gonna choose guys much bigger. Bigger than me, right? 

17:02
Brian Lawrence
Yeah. 

17:02
Brennan Lynch
And it's the same thing when you go to these accounts, like do you want to win or do you Want to lose. 

17:07
Brian Lawrence
Yeah, yeah. And talking about math, something you said that I want to dig deeper into because I think it is going to catch the attention of so many sellers you were talking about, and I've seen this myself, deals that 10x when you take them through Marketplace. Can you talk a little bit about like some of the mechanics and some of the drivers that you've seen of like single year deal becoming a multi year deal or what you've seen that facilitates and what that looks like and how a deal can 10x by going through Marketplace. 

17:39
Brennan Lynch
Well, that's where you kind of think about cloud infrastructure spend, right? The cloud infrastructure budget. And, and many companies, most, many companies may call it something else, but that's essentially what it is, right? That cloud infrastructure spend. And, and you're looking at your specific technology and your specific technology usually has its own sort of budget, right? Whether you're, you know, a security product and you're working to get into the security, you know, budget your business application solution and you want to get in the business applications budget, you're in a kind of a pigeonholed budget, right? And every company is different but the probability that the customer has a cloud infrastructure spend and that cloud infrastructure spend is the largest budget in their IT security budget and it could be sometimes the largest bill the company pays on a monthly basis, recurring bill, right? 

18:40
Brennan Lynch
Especially if they're leaning heavily into the cloud or you're selling into a company that has cloud products, maybe you're selling to a software company that is a SaaS solution, right? And so that cloud infrastructure spend is going to be oftentimes a much larger budgetary pool and a much broader selection of technologies. And one of the ways to essentially qualify for that cloud infrastructure spend, especially if you're a SaaS solution, is to be able to transact through a cloud service provider, transact through essentially the billing machine that they have for this cloud infrastructure budget, right? Ideally, cloud infrastructure spend goes through the cloud service provider so they can draw down on their cloud service provider commit, right? And so getting access to that larger budget is great even if the client doesn't have a cloud service provider commit or they made their commit. 

19:36
Brennan Lynch
If you can manage to identify within that cloud infrastructure spend, the budget constraints sometimes are less and you can have broader access to a broader funding pool, to a larger funding pool and sometimes less constraints on price and less constraints on available budget. So that's where I look at this and think, you know, go where the bigger pots of money are, right? I think about some of the GSI's, right, where they've helped enable cloud service provider adoption. Right. By doing digital transformation. They've been, they've been creating millions and probably billions of dollars in billable hours for digital transformation practices. Hey, we'll help you move from on Prem to cloud. We'll help you move from on Prem to cloud. Right. We'll get our guys in there and we'll. It will help you figure it out. Right. 

20:37
Brennan Lynch
And now their total available funds has sort of lessens from the traditional IT budget. And you're seeing cloud service providers now pivot to wanting to transact their services and their resale by SV through the GS, through, sorry, the cloud service providers now so that they can regain essentially the total available pool of funds that they had used to have access to. But they carved it down essentially with their own efforts. So they're a victim of their own success. So, you know, you'll, that's just an example of whatever I see in society, markets moving because that it's. And it's a clear example of why. 

21:26
Brian Lawrence
Yeah, I always go back to Willie Sutton. They asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. And his answer was, well, that's where the money is. And when you think about the cloud, that's where the money is. So pivotal, a little bit away from the seller side of it. I think one of the things we've seen is for people to be successful companies, to be successful on cloud marketplaces, they also have to have internal alignment with marketing, with operations, with deal desk, with finance. How at Cyberark can you share a little of like how you built that internal alignment and how important that was in terms of helping you grow as quickly as you have on the cloud marketplaces? 

22:09
Brennan Lynch
Well, that's always the special million dollar questions. When I have friends call me up and say, hey, I just want to get some advice. And I always want to say, can you send the 1099 first? And they never do, right? 

22:20
Brian Lawrence
Yep. 

22:22
Brennan Lynch
And you know, it also starts out though with your product, with your it, Right. You know, where are you hosting your product? To give you another crime analogy. Right? Because you said Willie Sutton. Right. Cloud service providers are like criminals, Right. You have to do time with them for them to do crime with you. Right? Yeah. And so you have to host with them for them to want to sell with you. And that's really the genesis of where you take this. Who are you hosting with? That's where you're going to go sell with. Right. If you host with all 3 or 4ish, depending. If you're in Europe, right, And you roll in Alibaba, good for you. You know, then you kind of move forward and you know you have to have your back end processes set up, right? 

23:06
Brennan Lynch
I mean setting up your marketplace listings are important, right? That's your storefront. It's important you have that, it's important that you have that well curated, right? With your product information, with videos, with you know, PDFs with collateral, things like that, right? Reference video if you can get a customer to put that up there, you know, a good breadth of products. But then you know, there's the whole, the whole party behind the party, right. You know, you know there's the catering, there's the slushy machine, there's the bar, there's the. Right, that all kind of comes into play. You know and I think the first people to talk to is finance. Make sure they understand what you're doing, what the value is, why this is relevant, how they essentially will get their money quicker and it'll cost them less. Right? That's very important to understand, right. 

24:08
Brennan Lynch
And then have that process for when an order confirmat. This is how we're going to reconcile it through your CRM. Ideally you'll reconcile it the same way as a po, except you won't have to have the PO review process. So it'll even go through your CRM that much faster. You can also create some automation. You have to think about how you're doing business. Are you doing public offers where it's fixed published pricing or you're going to do private offers where it's bespoke pricing for every individual customer. Right. And you have to think about what does your product lend itself to? Is it, is it a product that is very self serviceable, people can buy it in chunks or you know, user accounts that allow them to essentially stand it up very easily. 

24:58
Brennan Lynch
You know, if you really want to get crazy, you leverage some of your cloud service providers, AI to create a chatbot to be able to help a client stand it up. You know, with more self service you create a, an AI deployment engine that gets it 80 there, right. And then last 20 is just some human intervention, right? Depends on how sophisticated you want to do, right? So you have to talk not only to finance, then you know, I just kind of talked about product and it, you know, a little bit and then you know, your marketing, you know, and leveraging these different machines, right? The leveraging the economies of scale, hey do you have something that integrates with Azure product and it's way deployed? Azure product. Great. Do you want to go and see if you can target those Azure customers? 

25:46
Brennan Lynch
Are you built in as a blueprint in tech and these are sort of versions 1, 2 and 3. Initially you just need to be able to reconcile the order confirmation, have your global tax dispensation out there so you understand where to charge tax, where to not charge tax. Right. There's usually about four countries. China, India and of all places, Canada. I think Canada is like the Justin Bieber of countries. Like it wants to be tough and hard and hang out with all like the rap gang members. It really just grew up in a nice neighborhood in suburban Canada. Like it's really just a nice guy, you know what I mean? You know, and so you want to think about these things though. 

26:30
Brennan Lynch
Your finance global tax dispensations, make sure that you can rev rack properly and then you start reaching out to sellers and thinking about how are we going to compensate our sellers? Are we going to do comp neutral where the listing fee that the cloud service provider charges us doesn't get charged against their attainment? Are you going to make this, you know, you're going to charge your sellers, you know, that listing fee against their attainment. Right. And everybody has their own emotions and opinions about that on how they want to go forward with that. But that's essentially, you know, sort of the basics, right? Yeah. And it's not terribly difficult. You have to be pragmatic about it and, and go forward and then, you know, you start expanding, creating structure. Right. 

27:21
Brennan Lynch
Think about creating a machine that is repeatable and where, you know, once it starts growing in one region and then you want to proliferate it to another region rep. Create the same infrastructure. Right. Ideally, your finance, your tax dispensations, your IT all that's going to be the same around the planet. I mean that's kind of the beauty of cloud service providers. You can do deals anywhere. We've done deals. One of the huge advantages, Australia and you can service your global customers anywhere. You know, I think the idea is, you know, just make sure your back office is set up. It's not really terribly difficult. Just have your processes down so you can revreck and kind of move from there. 

28:08
Brian Lawrence
Scalability, criminality. Justin Bieber. We're covering all the hot topics. Yeah. But before I let you go, one of the things you. So your weekly LinkedIn tips are just amazing. Highly recommend everyone check those out. One of the things that you have in there, that struck me because literally I was just in one of the hyperscalers offices with a couple boxes of cupcakes. And so you talk about the importance of the face to face aspect of it and intermingling with the selling teams from the hyperscalers. What's your advice? What have you seen? Why do you think that's so important? 

28:52
Brennan Lynch
I think it's very important because, you know, they know where the money is, they know where the, at the PRojects are, Right. And they need to know who you are. Right. If they're in a customer and a customer says, hey, I'm looking at standing up this environment, gosh, I sure need some secure access to this environment. Do you know of anybody? You want them to think of you? Right? You want them to think of Cyberark, right. Or, you know, if you're, you know, any other technology, I'm looking for Endpoint Security. You want them to think of say, something like a crowd strike or, you know, you want them to have that kind of awareness. 

29:31
Brennan Lynch
But then you also want to start looking at target accounts together and focusing on those ones that are going to make sense where they're relevant and not focusing on the ones where they're not relevant. You know, and it's kind of your basic channel strategy, right. You want to make sure that you also have your channel partners involved with this, that, you know, you're, you're cultivating, you know, deals that leverage the most amount of resources to influence the customer on your behalf. Right? So you want your channel partner involved and channel partner bought in. Hey, this is going to transact through a marketplace, your marketplace resources involved in supporting you on it, you know, and everybody can derive value through the whole process, Right. You know, your channel partner might be able to do the services to deploy and configure, right. 

30:23
Brennan Lynch
They may be doing the digital transformation effort. Right. You know, there's a variety of. We've had deals where channel partner is doing services on deployment and configuration. The GSI is doing the digital transformation effort and it's transacting through a marketplace. 

30:38
Brian Lawrence
Right. 

30:39
Brennan Lynch
So it's a matter of being completely transparent with all the resources in play and coordinating them so that everybody is doing their specific element of the deal and accessing the resources at the account. Right. And helping you do that. Right. Your channel partner might be at the technical evaluator, right. The AWS resource is going to be at the procurement and budget side and also leadership side. Right. Maybe the GSI is on the upside or the vision of where the company is going. Right. So everybody has a role to play. And even if you maybe you have an msp, who's going to be hosting your stuff through Marketplace. 

31:32
Brian Lawrence
Yep. 

31:33
Brennan Lynch
Or if you're doing deals self service, you know, then it's important that they just kind of transact through and they roll through and it's very easy and it's very serviceable and that the AWS sellers know, hey, this is just something that's going to roll through. Just support it. 

31:52
Brian Lawrence
Yep. Brennan, you've been incredibly generous with your time. I mentioned LinkedIn because I think you're a fantastic follow there. Where else should people, if they want to keep track of you and Cyberark and find out the latest. Are there other spots or is it LinkedIn or where else should people go to learn more? 

32:12
Brennan Lynch
Definitely track me on LinkedIn. That's the easiest place to find me. And then you'll find me at AWS summits all around the planet this year. So if you're interested in connecting, please reach out to me on LinkedIn and we'll see if we're going to be at the same summit together. Happy to go and, you know, meet with those who have questions. 

32:30
Brian Lawrence
Sounds great. Brendan, thank you so much for your time. 

32:34
Brennan Lynch
Thank you. Appreciate it. My man. Be well. 

‍32:36
Brian LawrenceYou too.