Partnering For Success: Field Alignment, Earnings, and Readiness with Google Cloud- Six Five On the Road

The ultimate proving ground for AI's promise? It's the customer experience. ⚡

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At this year's Google Cloud Next, host Tiffani Bova and Colleen Kapase, VP Channels and Partner Programs at Google Cloud discussed how Google Cloud is transforming partner opportunities with its latest co-sell and services registration announcement. Find out how Google Cloud is giving partners the tools they need to succeed by truly understanding customer needs and embracing deep verticalization.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹Elevated Partner Roles: The rise of AI is transforming the partner landscape, demanding a shift towards more consultative, solution-oriented selling that addresses specific business outcomes.

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🔹Vertical Expertise is Key: Partners are increasingly leveraging Google Cloud's verticalized solutions to deliver deep industry expertise and drive impactful results for customers.

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🔹AI Across the Stack: From infrastructure to applications, AI is infused throughout the Google Cloud ecosystem, enabling partners to deliver comprehensive solutions that meet the evolving needs of their clients.

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🔹Partner Enablement and Growth: Google Cloud is heavily investing in partner enablement, providing the tools, resources, and incentives they need to build successful AI practices and drive customer value.

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Learn more at Google Cloud.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

Tiffani Bova: Hello and welcome to Six Five On The Road. I am Tiffani Bova and I am here at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas with my friend Colleen. And we're going to talk about all the news that has come out this week. So I'm super excited to have this time with you.

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Colleen Kapase: Me too. I'm so excited to get to chat with you about the amazing magic happening this week.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, there's so much, but we have so little time. You know, I just want to start with, you know, there's been a lot of conversation over the years. You and I have been doing this for some period of time together.

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Colleen Kapase: Don't give away my age!

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Tiffani Bova: Right, exactly. But there's been a lot of movement, not only in the partner community, but also the demands from end users and what they want from providers and partners and the selling motion. And I think that was a huge part of your announcement this week. So I'd love you to dig into that some more.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah, I'm really excited about it, Tiffani. I think especially with AI, you're looking at new ways for business users to go to market and they really want a collaborative experience between their vendors like Google, their partners. And what is the outcome that we can drive? And that's changing the sales process a lot. It's changing the role that the partner is in. It's expanding the role, it's elevating the role and it's making more of a consultative solution, outcome oriented sale.

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Tiffani Bova: Why do you think and I know you really stressed this when you were on stage. Like, listen, this is really good, right? This is good for you from an opportunity standpoint, from a collaborative standpoint, from an alignment standpoint, to go after this great opportunity that we have in front of us right now. It's AI.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah.

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Tiffani Bova: Why do you think there's the hesitation? You think it's just the history that never really worked out for them in the past? Is it that they're afraid of the channel conflict, maybe rearing its head again? What do you think is their hesitation?

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Colleen Kapase: I think that's a great question. Change, I think, is part of it. It's an investment in the process too. You have to have technical folks, you have to bring in industry experts within your organization. If you're a partner, you can't talk deeply about a healthcare solution without folks who understand what the problem statement is and how to make things better. So having those experts, it's changing the staff that you may have as a partner. It's changing how you position yourself. And you know, change is hard. We're humans, we like, you know, routine things. So I think that's a piece of it. And then just how do I move my investments from maybe an old world way of thinking to more of this consultative solution piece. But when I see partners get to the other side, they're more in control. They have better, tighter customer relationships, better teamwork with us as a vendor and a solution provider. And I just see them happier and more in control and more profitable. And so when they get to the other side, it's an amazing place. Just making that change takes some, some effort.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, but I think it's all in the opportunity. Right? I think once they see the opportunity, you've also made tremendous investments in the verticalization which you just quickly mentioned. Yeah, and I think there's a ton of opportunity there as well because maybe some partners don't have that deep expertise in a particular industry or vertical and in that co-sell motion they really leverage all that Google brings to the table that complements maybe areas that they're lighter in. I don't want to say weak. Right. But just lighter in from the capabilities. You think that's a big opportunity for them as well?

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Colleen Kapase: Absolutely. And I also think when you're thinking about it from a technical perspective and you're horizontal, like every customer is your customer and you can go wide in the market but not necessarily deep. So when you move to more of a vertical mindset, you do have to focus more, your customers are more specific in who are our must win accounts. But, then when you get into that customer, I think your ability to go deeper into not just selling to the CIO like that is the magic of the opportunity. You're selling to the providers you're selling to, the product creators you're selling to, you know, the specific business use cases and the business decision makers, that also takes a different selling motion because you're going up beyond the CIO, beyond the technical sale, to that solution outcome. And that takes a different type of seller, it takes a different type of positioning of the solution and it makes you move beyond just what the tech can do to how we can solve and help you with business problems. But when it happens, it's magic. And then that customer often is your customer for life.

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Tiffani Bova: Any example you'd be willing to share on a great co sell, you know, that you've seen in the field where like you said, when it gets to the other side, it's just magic.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah, we've seen one with Quantify and, and Bayer and them really leaning in from a radiology solution standpoint and able to identify a rare lung disease with using AI on the scan that most radiologists aren't really looking for. 

They're looking for more of the large scale issues that are more commonplace and they're actually saving lives with this solution and the partnership between us and Bayer and Quantify those that sales rep and quantify are talking on a weekly basis and when you talk to Bayer, they're like, this has allowed me to create a product that didn't exist before and they're saving lives. I mean there's, there's no better solution to get to than that.

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Tiffani Bova: I agree. And I think that's that to me, to use your word right. It is magic.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah.

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Tiffani Bova: And I think that's the opportunity. I'm a huge fan of co-sell when done right.

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Colleen Kapase: Yes.

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Tiffani Bova: I am not a fan of the excuse of channel conflict. Like there's 100 reasons why not. Like we need to have a lot of reasons why. And I think you've worked really hard on making sure that you transition tried to catch all the reasons why not they would want to do it. And so, you know, kudos to you and the team for pulling it together for the event this week.

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Colleen Kapase: I love it. And you see the customers all the time. What do you think about the customers and how they see the vendors and the partners coming together? And what they see is the value of us sort of being a team together in the sales process?

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Tiffani Bova: So I'd build on what you said. This is a different buyer in many cases. And the channel, whether you're an ISV or a reseller or a managed service provider, whatever, or even a distributor, like you know what, whatever it might be or an SI or a global SI. Right. The buyer you may have had historically may not be your buyer for these particular kinds of solutions like you were just describing. And it's very hard unless you're large to have that kind of breadth and depth across vertical and industry and capability from a selling motion.

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Colleen Kapase: Yep.

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Tiffani Bova: Fair. And Google is not small.

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Colleen Kapase: No, we're not.

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Tiffani Bova: And you have a lot of resources in a lot of ways for you to bring to bear all that capability that it's like the muscle behind that relationship that the channel may own. But now you come with this whole team of people behind you that are equally interested in the success. And so it's a triangle of success for the customer, for the partner and for Google. And when that works really well together, I think it's super powerful.

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Colleen Kapase: I love that perspective. And you are, you know, sitting at the forefront of hearing those customers and seeing the complete outcome. So thank you for sharing that.

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Tiffani Bova: So the co-sell story is great, but usually what comes right behind that is how much money will I make? And then it lends from how much money I will make to the incentives that will be put in place. So you had a bunch of announcements this week around the incentives .And so. 

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Colleen Kapase: We are putting more and more into supporting our partners in co-sell. I mean, more in terms of how we can fund them with incentives, in terms of assessments, in terms of workshops, in terms of collaborating with our customers. And then even more, we're doubling down on the post sales services funding that we give to partners to help with the process of implementing those technologies. All of that said, we're also doubling our incentives on AIs. We're quadrupling our incentives in terms of workspace. But the most important thing when we get to profitability is we can put our incentives there. And that's amazing, but it's really lubricant to help the process. The main piece of profitability is that partners are now really in charge of their own destiny from a services perspective in terms of working with the clients and directly working with them on what that solution work looks like, what does that statement of work look like? And that's where the profit is. Frankly, that is so much more profitable than maybe more traditional ways of going to market for partners. And the sky's the limit.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, value is not just monetary. Value is in extending relationships, getting closer to the customer, solving big problems like how to cure cancer or provide better education or whatever it might be. But I think the thing that I really leaned into was around everything you did with the hub, the earnings hub, that now partners have a single place to go and understand all the value that they have at their fingertips, number one. But number two, what they're not leveraging today that they should be leveraging.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah, that's a huge step forward for us. I was hearing from partner executives before, hey, sometimes I'm just getting these checks, they're showing up and I don't know why. And you know, that kind of breaks my heart just a little bit because it's not necessarily driving the behavior. And a lot of our incentives are deal specific. So by creating this transparent hub and being able to let executives see all the funds coming throughout the sales cycle from Google, it was really an aha moment. I mean, literally, we had a partner come to us and say, hey, I didn't know I was awarded $19 million from you? I thought I got half a million. So it's been really enlightening for partners to see just how much we're investing in them for executives to have that sort of line of sight. And now we've put AI and Gemini underneath it. So now just the insights that each of our partners can get in terms of how they are doing against their peers, are they really maximizing our incentives? Did they leave something on the table? Is there more that they could do? What does it look like with their customers from a consumption standpoint? Is something slowing down? Is there a reason why? Do you need to get in there and have another conversation with the customer? Is there an opportunity for another project? You know, these are all the insights that we're bringing to our partners. And I think having them see the power of AI in terms of their actual earnings from us also just educates us executives on what AI can do for us from a business perspective as well. So I'm excited.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, it's twofold. It's two things, I think, scale and opportunity. Yeah, right. How do you scale the business with Google? How do you scale the business with your clients? What's the opportunity I have to introduce new services and products to my customers based on what I've already done because it's powered by AI and Gemini underneath it. What opportunities do I have to co-sell? What opportunities do I have to leverage MDF or co-op dollars or whatever it might be to help me accelerate and improve and increase velocity of a deal? I mean, so much power if you can have it in one place. And I think you and I have heard over decades make it easy to do business.

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Colleen Kapase: Yes.

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Tiffani Bova: And I really think that this earnings hub is a step towards really making it easier.

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Colleen Kapase: It is. It's actually a ton of different data sources being piped in from all sorts of different programs and systems into one place to give a single dashboard because it needs to be easy for them to work with. It's also what I've been told is we really, as senior executives, we're sort of the laggards in adopting some of this new technology from an AI experience perspective. So this gives them a way to actually see it in, in real life for their businesses. And already I've been hearing from executives that they're absolutely loving it. And it's so simple and intuitive. And that's just the holy grail for incentives is making things simple and intuitive.

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Tiffani Bova: But it's more than a dashboard. Let's not oversimplify. You Sometimes people are just like, oh yeah, AI is going to, you know, bring this data forward to me in a way that I can see it and understand it more easily.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah.

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Tiffani Bova: And sort of surface opportunities. But it's just more than that. And I think sometimes the rudimentary is kind of like, ah, do I really need it? When you start to see the power of it and everything that's surrounded by that, it really should stop. People stop in their tracks and go, wait a minute, why haven't I been doing this sooner?

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Colleen Kapase: You are so right. It's not only where you can come and simply learn where you can take action. What is the next thing that I need to do and what do I look at with my sales team and my go to market that Google's rewarding me with? How can I do more of that? Oh, I'm bringing in new customers. Wow. The profitability of that is pretty high. Let's look at what those next new customer opportunities are. It's just one example. So getting from insights to action I think is really the magic and the power of AI.

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Tiffani Bova: What a great way to say that. Insights to action. I love it. And I think if you look forward and we go, okay, we've talked about co-sell, we've talked about this amazing power underneath it in the hub. But next for me that I really found a great investment that Google was making was around training, learning, reskilling. I often get asked, especially from partner companies, they will say something like, I need to invest in my people, but what if I invest in them and they leave? And I'm always like, what if you don't invest in them and they stay right. I mean it's almost worse. And so you have been spending so much time on making sure that as these new capabilities come from Google that the channel is actually enabled to be effective in the field. So maybe you can talk about that.

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Colleen Kapase: You know, one of the things I love about Google is just the learning culture that we have here. We have invested over $100 million frankly in partner enablement in the last few years. And, we're keeping that investment and expanding it. So it is a learning culture. I would say to those executives, like, what if I invest in my employees and they might leave? If you don't invest, especially in your data people, from an AI perspective, they'll leave anyway because they know their careers are going to fall behind, they know their earning potential will fall behind and they just know they're not at the tip of the spear. So we have developed I would consider the best in class AI journey for our partners and we've expanded it behind AI Insights, customer experience specific there. What can you do? We've done it in terms of workspace. What is the end user experience with collaboration for AI. And these are journeys that we've made very simple and hands-on experience for our partners. Because AI is about using it, it's not just sitting back and understanding the technology. So workshops, hands on labs where the partners, employees can come in and learn what this really looks like and learn to position it and learn the power of the AI. And I'm super excited and I would really say to any partner not taking advantage of this, you're missing an opportunity because it's there for the taking. You really just have to bring your people and make sure you're planning for them what they should be learning next.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, the partners of the companies that will win in the future are going to be those that use technology better than their competition, full stop. Right. And so it's a big lift and investment for partners to actually provide training to their employees. And so what I really loved about the announcement was not only are you providing it, you're trying to make it as sort of cost neutral as possible. So that you're not saying, look, in order for you to do this with us, you're gonna have to spend all this money.

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Colleen Kapase: Yeah, right, exactly.

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Tiffani Bova: We want you to do it with us. This is why. And we are going to invest in you in order to make it happen.

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Colleen Kapase: We will bring some of the best curriculum, the best, most innovative ways to learn to the table for our partners. We just need our partners to bring the people and the minds there and get them there, you know, butts and seats, as they say, and give them the opportunity to learn and chart a path for them too. I think that's another really important thing is making sure you understand what's the specific AI expertise you want and go for it.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, we did a global study on what CEOs thought about AI and where and how they wanted to use it. And the number one of the number one things, the top, let's say the top two or three things we heard was around the enablement of their own people. Right? They don't have the skills. So it's not like we have all the skills out in the market and people can just go pick. There aren't a lot of skills yet. Because every day, as you said on stage this week, every single day, something new in AI comes out. And so what you learned two weeks ago is almost not relevant. Right. You have to stay on top of it. And so enablement for CEOs, you know, if channel companies that are listening to this, like enabling your teams and your people to keep and retain talent, it will attract more talent. And instead of making those investments yourself, you have an opportunity to do it with Google.

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Colleen Kapase: I mean, Tiffani, we're selling products that didn't exist three months ago. Agent Space is one of those new absolutely transformative products. It literally didn't exist. And bam, it's here and it is the buzz, I think of this event and every partner I'm talking to sees that huge opportunity. But you have to stop, you have to learn, you have to understand the product, how do you use it for search, how do you build low code, no code agents with it, how do you position it? And what we're finding that's amazing with our partners is they're sitting down and creating their own custom workshops. Once they understand it, once they're using the technology, then they have to, you know, really educate. It's an educational consultative sale. And, and so our partners figured out how to position that with their unique special sauce. I mean, it's pretty amazing to watch some of the things that these partners are creating and it's an opportunity for these partners to differentiate themselves too.

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Tiffani Bova: So I don't like asking this question when so much really great stuff has just come out because I'm like, but looking ahead, you know, like you just said, the things you're now announcing weren't around three months ago. It's hard for you to go, I don't know, I don't know what we should be talking about three months from now. Right. But ultimately, like, you know, obviously you're leading a lot of this within, within Google. What, what's on your roadmap for this enablement?

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Colleen Kapase: Well, I'll tell you, with $75 billion this year being invested into AI by Google, we expect to keep seeing more. Workspace, I think is one of those areas that we're putting a ton of focus on AI because it's the individual user using the AI. And so not only how are they using it from an email perspective, how are you using this from a voice perspective, how are you using this for videos? One of the things I see salespeople doing is putting these quick videos together of, you know, hey, customer, here's what's going on, here's what's new this month. Three minute snippet. But maybe that person's not great at doing videos. And they weren't making eye contact, they were looking down. AI can just change that for them. AI can literally help them just with their eye contact and change. They don't have to retake it and it's like clicking a button. It’s that simple. These are things that didn't exist six months ago that exist now. So we're going to spend a lot. Monthly updates are coming from our workspace AI for individual users to just improve how they're working with their collaboration apps. That being said, the data, the enterprise engagements that we're having there, the creativity coming there, I mean, honestly, I'm not sure if I can predict where DeepMind is going because it is keeping me on my toes. But what I can tell partners is that continuous learning cycle. We can't just learn at the beginning of the year and think these are the products we're going to sell. Right, let's go. For the rest of the year. Here's my sales plan. You have to be ready for things to evolve quarterly, monthly, sometimes even daily. And you know, keep on top of that information and keep a learning mindset all year round. Instead of like a deep technical learning that you do over a one week period, consider how do you break it up into smaller chunks over a period of time throughout the year and that's going to set up the sales and the technical staff to really be successful.

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Tiffani Bova: Staying curious is, you know, absolutely top of mind. Well, I know this has been a crazy, busy, amazing, energizing week. 

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Colleen Kapase: Yes, magic is what I'd say.

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Tiffani Bova: Okay, if there's one thing that you didn't expect coming into the week, that, that you come out the other end and be like, well, I wasn't expecting that. What would that be?

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Colleen Kapase: Oh, there's a lot of things that come to mind. I think one of the things that I'm seeing, Tiffani, is, you know, we've gone from 6,000 partners at this event to 9,000. And when I talk to the partners, it's that partners are bringing more of a depth of people here. You know, if they came with 10 people, they're coming with 30. If they came with 30, they're coming with a hundred. And they're coming because they're bringing different industry sales leaders here, different depth of sales folks here. And they're coming and they're like, wow, I expected there to be some AI. I didn't expect 99% of the content here to be AI. And it really is because it's infused, you know, from the chip all the way to the data, all the way to the end user experience. And I think that the magic that I'm seeing from the partners is how we're delighting them. And not saying AI is here, we're POC-ing with customers, but real life implementations of what's happening at customers and how fast it's moving and how much it is changing. And it is just a given that we are in the AI age now and our partners are going to be central in it. And seeing that magic, that's probably the part that has sort of surprised me and delighted me, frankly, too.

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Tiffani Bova: Well, excellent. Well, Colleen, thank you so much for joining me on Six Five Media On The Road. Thank you for joining us at Google Cloud Next. I'm Tiffani Bova. And don't forget to check out the rest of our content on SixFiveMedia.com.

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