We Value Our Partners, and It Shows!

Partners, we love you!

Wow! What a whirlwind of success I have had the privilege to personally witness Delphix enjoy over these last three years. We at Delphix realize that this has only been possible by forming successful partnerships with the world’s premier system integrators, value added resellers, and trusted services providers. There is no way we could boast over 30% of the Fortune 100 without the dedication, determination, and trust of our partners. At Delphix, it is well-known that we believe our people are our most important resource, and we value our partners to the same degree.

We can do better

Yet, when I looked at the Delphix business toward the end of our last fiscal year, I kept asking myself, “Yeah, this has been an incredible year, but why couldn’t it have been 2 or 3 times that?” So, I started working through our sales data and identifying constraints. Partners were doing incredibly well selling Delphix, but the lead time for the first deal was taking too long for my liking. When I started analyzing statistical data for correlations, there seemed to be a common-thread: Too many “touch points” for new partners. What I mean by that, is partner on boarding was too bespoke and required heavy assistance until the partner could sustain themselves. To that end, I want pause for a moment and thank all of my colleagues who have spent so many hours enabling our partners. Well done.

Constraints

Following the theory of constraints, I know that adding more staff or reducing our influx of new partners did not actually solve for the issue. The constraint was (mainly) around enablement. That was something I knew we could fix. So, I reached out to one of our Channel Directors and asked him if he agreed with me on the constraint. He did. Then I boldly told him my plan to fix it, and asked him if he would let me attempt to do so in his territory. Thankfully, he did. In March, I went to our partner summit in Rome and gathered the “needs and wants” list from our partners, found out what worked and what didn’t. I made an open commitment to our partners then that we would work to rapidly address the problem. And we sure did.

The Essential Path

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced our “Essential Path for Delphix Partners” Sales and Presales tracks. This enablement is designed to quickly enable our partners to have a command of the core Delphix competencies. After completing this track, and coupled with our strategic touch points, our partners will be able to autonomously explain both “Why Delphix?” and “How does Delphix do it?” for 80% of the use cases they will encounter. The overarching goal is to accelerate our partners’ first 90 days in Delphix, so that they are closing more deals and bigger deals earlier in their journey. The new enablement boasts 27 courses, over 60 new chapters, over 400 minutes of new content, and a variety of perspectives from the US, South America, Europe, the UK, and Australia. We are really excited at what has been accomplished in so short of a time!

But wait… there’s more!

But, this is just the beginning. The Essential path is currently being extended to include services delivery, and the Advanced Path and Master Path are also being added. Plus, for some of our select strategic alliances, we will soon be offering our Delphix Partner University (that my great pal, Woody Evans, is leading). The Delphix Partner University will be based upon the same courses of the Essential Path, but will also include additional courses that are tailored for our partners that are making considerable investments in establishing Centers of Excellence and creating core business units inside their organization around Delphix. If you are one of our partners and are reading my blog, please accept my personal and heartfelt THANK YOU! You are one of the many reasons that it is such a great time to be at Delphix. Well, I am off to fix the next constraint in the chain…. talk to you soon!