Listen to the latest VMware Renewals podcast to hear Tevin Clyde, VMware Renewals, and Nick Wager, Pre-Sales System Engineer, as they explore the offers and benefits of Carahsoft’s Affinity to Infinity (A2I) VMware Renewals Partner Program.
Natalie Lopez
Hi Tevin.
Tevin Clyde
Hey Nat, how are you?
Natalie Lopez
Good, how are you?
Tevin Clyde
I'm doing fabulous. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
Natalie Lopez
We're so happy to have you. We are here with Tevin Clyde and Nick Wager to talk about our A2I and our upsell program.
Tevin Clyde
Absolutely, or better known as affinity to infinity. Sometimes I like A2I better, though.
Natalie Lopez
A2I is pretty cool.
Tevin Clyde
I like it better. It rolls off the tongue well.
Natalie Lopez
I completely agree.
Tevin Clyde
Right, absolutely.
Natalie Lopez
Tevin, I want you to tell me all about A2I. And let's start with the history of the program.
Tevin Clyde
I'd absolutely love to our program was founded in 2017 by our partner manager, Cory Rooney. Since we have started A2I has become something that provides targeted solutions to help fill the gaps while also driving partners to position net new opportunities. Above going into that we have since starting the program contributed to $252 million in renewals, and then $112 million in upsell revenue.
Natalie Lopez
That's amazing.
Tevin Clyde
Right? So, we've had a great start, and we're only getting better along the way.
Natalie Lopez
Well, what I'm hearing is not only are you helping partners with everything they need to be helped with, but we're you're also being extremely successful on both our ends, which is helping everybody.
Tevin Clyde
Yes, I love to call it almost like a concierge service. How can I assist? What can we do better for you? And we'll make it happen?
Natalie Lopez
Oh, that's amazing. I love that.
Tevin Clyde
Yes, absolutely.
Natalie Lopez
All right. Now let's get into, you know, what, like, step by steps, and what how this helps partners in their day to day?
Tevin Clyde
No, absolutely. And so, this is where we get really into it. Um, it all starts from step one. And that will be somebody will pitch you the program, and its enrollment or as reaching out to ask about the program. So once you do, I'll set up a formal meeting, we'll go into all of the steps, just as I'm about to right now give you a high level overview of the program, how that's going to affect your day to day and what you typically have going on in your environment, because we know that not every single environment is always going to be the same. And the whole point of the program is to make sure that we're catering to that specific partner's needs and what we can assist with.
Natalie Lopez
So, with different partners that can tell it's going to look different
Tevin Clyde
Every single time.
Natalie Lopez
That's amazing. That's going to help everybody all across the board.
Tevin Clyde
Absolutely. And it also gives us the opportunity to constantly be changing so that we can better assist anybody who decides to go this route with us or explore new opportunities to assist that we may not have even tried before.
Natalie Lopez
Wow. So, who wouldn't want to get this as my question?
Tevin Clyde
It makes me so happy when I get the opportunity to talk about it, because it seems like something that very much it explains itself well.
Natalie Lopez
Yes, I agree. Let's hear this process.
Tevin Clyde
Continuing down the process. So, it all starts with enrollment. Once you enroll, there's a very big portion of the process in the very beginning with a big red exclamation point. That is our signup page. Once you go to our signup page, you'll complete a form that will actually ask you to get your managers approval for us to pull your entire incumbent install base from VMware. And so, once we have that information as where we kind of dive down into the nitty gritty in the intro meeting before or after, and it's dependent on how the partner would like to go about it. Before or after the sign up in the intro meeting, we'll discuss what next steps will look like. So that's where we move into the plan. And the plan of the whole process goes like it can go differently every single time. The way that ends up looking in the long run is will form a plan for giving you a spreadsheet to organize your upcoming renewals and set a date for how far out we're able to evaluate that, we'll discuss how often you would like to check in on these opportunities or have us check in with you. We can discuss multiple forms of upsell options and or potential blueprints and things like demos or campaigns that we do to get you the most information needed for those potential options. And Nick will get into that a little bit later, which we're very excited for. And so, we'll go over everything that comes with the program as a whole. Once we formulate that plan, it gets into the next step, which is where everything starts to get fun. So, we get into the building and the growth part. And as I mentioned a little bit before the growth is going to come from our upsell options, things that we can add to enhance these environments and you know, potentially offer that higher margin that I mentioned a little bit earlier. And then we also with that will do two separate things. We will get that report from VMware, and it will show us your incumbent Carahsoft opportunities as well as your non-incumbent Carahsoft opportunities. We as a program go through and build those non-incumbent opportunities out and we separately send those between a certain date range, whether that be we start Are did from now until the end of the year, we'll go through build out all of the non-incumbent opportunities through the end of the year, you'll receive an email with a zip file package from me as an option, if you so choose to bring that business back to Karis up for your following year to track it. So, a lot of the building and growth in the background with the with our proactive team, the proactive team will be sending your normal income and opportunities to you just as your process is now, unless you indicate at the time that you would like us to change that. We've had multiple types of feedback to indicate something that helps your specific environment better than what we're already providing, whether that be, hey, please include the previous year's Pio number, or please include this in piece of information so that I can track it down in my system faster. And we'll look for every single one of those indicators that we can take. Because the more that we can assist no matter how small the task is that we can take it off your plate, if it's a possibility. A2I is going to do that. So, moving from there, what I had mentioned before, you'll receive quotes in two different ways, the proactive team will be sending you opportunities as we do 90 days out, they will be coming to you to your direct email or to that direct point of contact who's handling that opportunity. And if it is not an incumbent opportunity, the person who is my main point of contact as in the person who signs up for the program, and tends to be the person I'm doing our monthly or monthly check ins with and sending our emails to make sure that there's correspondence and there's no confusion in the program, that point of contact will be receiving a zip file from me. And in that zip file, I'll indicate all the account managers that are on those specific opportunities, how we can assist and what they should do in order to reach out should there be anything that we can do to start working on this right away.
Natalie Lopez
Amazing. So, crossing T's and dotting I's for everybody involved.
Tevin Clyde
The whole way across the board as much as we can. Absolutely. To the best of our ability. After we do all of the building sending and all of the you know the hard parts, I guess I would like to say that comes in my opinion, my favorite part, which is the review, we get the opportunity to sync up, which as I had mentioned a little bit earlier, we will do however you'd like. So, we can do biweekly meetings, we can do weekly meetings monthly or bimonthly, whatever works best for your typical environment, or for what works best for heads in your office. If there's a specific day of the week that works better, or anything that we can cater down to even the smallest thing, we'll do that to make sure that we can sync up because it's very important to review all of this to see how we can grow and do even better moving forward. We're never looking to find something and say this is just fine. And we'll keep it as is we always want to be growing to do things more efficiently and assist in the highest possible manner.
Natalie Lopez
Yeah, well, that is truly how you be successful in a business as you're always trying to achieve better and do better than you did previously.
Tevin Clyde
Absolutely. And we already very much enjoy, you know, these partners coming and working doing business with assisting and getting these deals taken care of. And when that you know, goes into it. At the end of the day, I like to think that I'm gonna provide you as much assistance as I can to show you that we love working with you, and that we want to continue that relationship. There's no superficial aspect. There's no weirdness involved. It's just genuine, how can I help? And I'm happy to do it. That's great. Yeah, it's incredible. So, moving in from here, I think the most important part, and that's one of the things that I'd like to take its own little section to discuss is the possibility of us upsell options that we can add, that is a big, big part of our renewal upsell program that is A2I. Because the upsell option is basically, I'd say more than 50% of everything that we can do, we can offer so many types of information, we do different demos, and blueprints and webinars. So, I'm actually going to throw it over to Nick and give him the opportunity to discuss some of those items with you and potentially give a few examples as well. So that if you're kind of wondering how that looks, you'll get a better idea.
Nick Wager
Hello, everyone. I'm Nick wager. I'm one of the engineers who comes in and helps out with the renewal upsell part of the A2I program, every customer that you're going to talk to is going to have gaps whether they know it or not. And a big part of the A2I program is to find those problems that a customer might not even know they have and provide them a solution to fix it. And these could be very, very simple solutions. You know, one of the most common upsell recommendations we give is for vSphere customers, you know almost everybody in the world is virtualized and most of those folks are virtualized with vSphere and so Carbon Black workload that's VMware is integrated next gen antivirus solution is kind of a no brainer solution, especially since it's got a free trial program that's active until December of this year. So, you know if you've got any vSphere customers, I highly recommend you introduce Carbon Black to them, offer them the free trial. Right? That's just one of the sort of upsell recommendations we give, you know, a lot of customers are missing monitoring tools, whether that be for their data center for the virtual desktops, for their laptops that they might be managing. And so, depending on what we see in terms of licensing environment built will provide various different recommendations in terms of monitoring and optimization. On the security front, you know, security has been a big, big concern for customers, and a lot of folks think of traditional physical firewalls, all they need, and that's just not the case anymore. Attackers are much more sophisticated these days. So, we want to lock down, you know, internal network traffic and make sure that isn't a point of compromise. We want to, you know, provide failover options, you know, a lot of customers are concerned if they get hit by ransomware. If the building burns down in a fire, you know, how are they going to fail over and they've been looking to cloud solutions for that. So, you know, VCDR VMware, cloud disaster recovery is a really, really popular solution on that front. And, you know, the discussion in regards to containers in modern apps, you know, it's a really, really exciting kind of forward-looking area. But a lot of customers, especially in public sector spaces, are really hesitant to embrace it. So, you know, we can go through these countless identify folks who, you know, might benefit from microservices from containerization. And offer, you know, we can talk about vSphere plus with them, we can talk about Tanzu Basic, or, you know, just Tanzu Kubernetes. In general, you know, whatever we see in the customer account will try to find a gap in the coverage and provide you a recommendation about where they can go from there. So that, you know, customers can solve their problems so that you know, yourself as a partner can, you know, benefit from selling those net new licensing and the higher level of margin that comes along with that, you know, even if it's a solution you've never heard about, we've got enablement programs. For our reseller partners, we, you know, we've got this this whole solution blueprint campaign for pretty much all the VMware solutions. So even if you're a day one employee, you know, we're more than prepare to introduce you to the solution, talk you through the selling motion, you know, how to pitch it to customers, so that, you know, at the end of this 30 minute, one hour session, you know, you can go in, bring it up with a customer set up a follow up appointment with myself or, you know, your own internal engineers, whatever works for you. You know, we've got weekly demo campaigns that we host Monday through Friday, for different VMware solutions that you can just tack on to emails, when you're with customer to generate leads, and use that as an extension of the A2I program. Overall, you know, regardless of what partners need, or how big or how small your account lists are, or how big or how small your customers are, there's always something we can do something we can recommend something we can show off or train, you know, the resellers on, so that the customers walk away with a environment that's going to run better, that's going to be more secure. And, you know, really help yourself as a reseller, you know, see yourself in that role as the trusted business adviser.
Natalie Lopez
That all sounded great. And, you know, part of the upsell and A2I program, is there still the test drives going on?
Nick Wager
Right. So VMware has this test drive program or portal that you know, I have access to as an as an engineer, and that I can help you know yourself as a reseller gain access to, you know, I use that for demos all the time, I use it to give customers a pre-configured cloud environment that they can poke around in for all the VMware solutions, you know, I can train you up is the reseller about how to get yourself an account how you can start these kind of proof of concepts with customers, you know, test drive provides a lot of flexibility in terms of demonstrations, in terms of dipping your toes in with these VMware solutions, or you can go full blown proof of concept. You know, there's the tools for that. And if you're interested, reach out to us and we'll help get you there.
Tevin Clyde
Absolutely. And that's the biggest part of it, it all comes back to if these are things that are going to assist you in your day to day or something that you're interested in, all you have to do is ask your A2I rep aka me, or any of the account managers that you may work with on a day to day basis. You could even directly email or reach out to any of our technical engineers, such as Nick himself, or we have a whole slew of other teammates who assist in that area. So, taking a step back it actually one of the biggest parts of A2I is something that almost gets overlooked every single time. When we have the opportunity to add those upsell options. They aren't just coming from nowhere or just ones that at the time, we think we should be pushing this so we're going to the way that we work, everything in the program is once you sign up, we actually go through and pull every single install base report for all of those operators. interviews that VMware sent us. What that does is it gives us a direct look into each customer's environment so that we can say, this is why we believe that you should pitch this option. This is why it will enhance what they are currently working with. And because of our amazing, you know, technical experts and upsell analysts that we have, there's nothing but tons of resources on information that you could potentially need to describe that we've even gone so far before as to have reps reach out, is there a way that you could assist me in phrasing this so that I can understand it, but get it to the customer in a way that won't confuse them, or can make it as easily presentable as it sounds, because we believe in these options, and we believe that they're going to assist. And so that's a big part of the program as a whole to is that nothing gets taken without consideration and large amounts of thought process behind it.
Natalie Lopez
Speaking of signing up, how would anybody enroll in this, like, what are those steps?
Tevin Clyde
That's a great question. Absolutely. So, a big part of A2I as a whole is we do have our own web page that you can view, and you can get all the information that you need. I myself am always available as well. So even if you're listening to this, and after that you stop listening to this podcast, you decide I'm going to call this guy for more information, please feel free, I would love to, I'm always happy to discuss A2I, it is always at the forefront of my brain. But getting into how you sign up. Typically, if you are hearing this from the podcast, that makes me super happy that you're here to learn about my program. But honestly, most of the time you'll hear about it from your renewal reps, your renewal reps will come to you they'll explain they'll express to you that they already believe that you would be a perfect fit for this program. And that we can provide a lot of assistance. And through doing that, they'll loop me in. As I mentioned before, we have our intro meetings. But the biggest part of that is giving you the page to sign up. So, you'll receive the external link to go to our signup page, review this information, request an intro meeting, or sign up and then request an intro meeting. It's all up to you completely. One of the things that I always like to make sure that I do mention whenever we go over the program as a whole is one of the biggest parts that we've recently added is our dashboard progress report. It has multiple types of metrics to show you as well as your higher ups how A2I is providing growth to your environment, and how we are assisting in real time, we can provide this report, as often as you would like we have seen success that it would be most convenient to receive quarterly, we'd also be happy to send you know a bi quarterly report if that fits better for you to see numbers and a higher volume. But we can provide this report in multiple different ways. And there are definitely multiple kinds of metrics that we can include for what you'd like to see growth in. So, a couple examples of those would be our on-time renewal rates, we also have a year-to-date growth, we have top deals in your pipeline. And also, things such as you know, product bookings by VMware business units. So that's one of the most important things that I always like to make sure that people are aware of is that we can provide assistance in your environment. But also, if you need us to, we'll show you how we're providing that assistance will show you that we're doing this work. We're here to provide you support in every way that we're available to. And if you ask me for something, I'm not going to tell you no first, I'm going to see if I can provide help and assistance in that environment or that specific problem. And I'll do it to the best of my ability.
Natalie Lopez
Wow, Tevin, you are just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to A2I. And it's been so great having you and Nick here today, hearing about all of this and I know this is this is going to be so great for our partners everywhere listening.
Tevin Clyde
Absolutely. I'm very excited and I'm just so thankful for the opportunity. As I said, you know, my name is Tevin Clyde. If you guys ever feel free to reach out, like I mentioned before, give me a call shoot me an email, even if you did it three seconds after you press pause on this recording that is perfectly fine with me.
Natalie Lopez
That's great. Thank you so much and we hope that Tevin will be hearing from you soon.
Tevin Clyde
Thank you so much for your time.