Cloudian’s Anna Christensen works on solidifying channel partnerships

As Cloudian’s Anna Christensen settles into her new role as channel manager Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), she will prioritise the deepening of the vendor’s relationships with existing active partners and revisit dormant ones while also onboarding new businesses.

Instead of onboarding lots of partners, Cloudian is choosing partners who are mature, aligned and ready to collaborate

“Those days where you just onboard many partners and hope for the best are over,” Christensen said to ARN.

Instead, the focus needs to be on creating mutual value, listening closely to end users and connecting them with the right partners, even if it’s outside the vendor’s solution.

Her approach emphasises collaboration across the ecosystem, between vendors, resellers and MSPs because long-term success comes from partnerships, not just product selling.

“I am a firm believer that you have to give to get,” she said. “I very much tried to always show to our new potential, existing and dormant channel partners that we are worth it.

“We are worth investing their time and strategy [into] because we will be going to the market together.”

Part of Christensen’s role also includes business development, allowing her to be close with the end users and understand “their challenges, what they do, their plans are and the points in the right directions when it comes to our sellers”.

As an example, she noted that Cloudian has a prospect in NSW of a company that formed out of a merger, with the previous businesses each containing different data sets, including some portions that have not been digitised.

“I came to this organisation because they needed storage, but their mess is so horrible that I can’t even think about storage first. I needed an organisation to help me tidy up this mess,” Christensen said.

“In my portfolio, there was a partner that specifically specialises at analysis, database cleansing and being able to make sense of all different unstructured data to tidy it up. That potentially is not the solution that Cloudian provides, but at the larger scope, Cloudian will be able to help.”

According to Christensen, that shows trust and discussions on value and driving for the end user and for the channel partner, so Cloudian can seamlessly deliver its product when the time is right.

“I strongly believe that we [need] to step out of our solution zone,” she said. “You need to collaborate with other vendors and with general partners of different scopes.”

Christensen explained that Cloudian has some resellers collaborating with MSPs because the reseller is not in a stage of development that they want to invest in infrastructure, because there is a lot that has to happen from the maturity perspective to provide those services.

“There is always space for collaboration and we have to look outside of just what we do,” she said. “That that’s where the real success is at and [are] the real long-term relationships that are going to be driving our business, our portfolios and our careers for many years ahead.”

Close networks

For Christensen, the inclination to bring people together make sense because relationships are everything for her.

“Basically, my network and the relationships I build with people are at the core of everything I do,” she said. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to move into a more client, channel partner and distributor-facing role.

“Marketing today involves a lot of digital activities, which is fantastic, and it plays into the idea that ‘I’m cooler online’. Quite often, when I meet business partners or end users, I’ll bring people together who don’t know each other and they get to know each other.”

It pleases Christensen to see people brings together often find common ground, sometimes unrelated to the IT industry, because in “the end, people buy from people and they play within spaces that feel close to them”.

“Today, I’m at Cloudian and tomorrow I might be somewhere else,” she said. “Today I sell to you and tomorrow, you might be selling to me.

“In the end, it’s us, people and our relationships that will shape what the future holds for us in the channel space and in the end user space.”

Christensen often explains to people that she has a “very big mortgage” and she is here to stay.

“I really care about building strong relationships with you and the ones we have already established,” she said. “I strongly believe that when challenges arise in your organisation, you’ll know I’m here to solve them.

“I’m always clear about that. I trust that when they’re ready, they’ll come to me. That’s what I value at the end of the day after all those long lunch-and-learns and fun-and-learns.”

Tackling the terabyte challenge

This is why Christensen is passionate about helping Cloudian’s channel partners, leveraging its start-up ability to work with MSPs on solving issues like upfront investment for end users.

The vendor is very much an enterprise-focused solution, she explained. It starts its pricing at 100 terabytes, and these are the companies and the people that have over 500 people. However, even with targeting these large organisations, she still comes across organisations that don’t have that much data.

“I still believe that I can help them, yet probably with the solution that we currently offer, I might not be able to help them as much,” she said.

“[For] everything that was too small for me to qualify into the enterprise space, where I can send my team out, [we] tap into managed service providers.

“I had this entire mechanism working quite well, as it provides managed service providers with an opportunity to collaborate on it.”

While they may not work with the vendor directly, the solution is available white-labelled through its managed service providers. This is how Cloudian found its anchor MSPs to support their initial investment.

Even though public cloud is still important and widely used, many large organisations are starting to rethink their strategies. Add in data sovereignty and they want to bring things back to on-premises, Christensen noted.

“That’s how our managed service providers came into the picture,” she said. “Some of them were larger opportunities to be a managed service provider.

“Then [with] whatever smaller opportunities, we’re just topping it up and making it bigger and bigger.”

MSPs make up around 50 per cent of overall Cloudian’s business globally. This is very much a part of the offering straight away for Christensen.

“When I target enterprise customers, I straight away talk to them about ‘as-a-service’ options with our managed service providers, which almost creates an additional service within our portfolio,” she said.

Having good mentors

Her championing of channel partners comes from her background in distribution, having spent time as Asia Pacific (APAC) marketing manager of unified communications at Exclusive Networks and then APAC head of channel marketing at Nextgen.

When it comes to distribution, Christensen noted that it “lives and breathes channel.” However, it was at Cloudian where she was able to evolve her marketing role into one that also encompassed sales.

“For me, marketing was always, at heart, very close to the channel,” she said. “I was always trying to be at the forefront of the business, [working] with channel partners, helping channel partners and that slowly becomes only a step away from taking what is potentially what you could call ‘just marketing’.”

This is because in the sector, marketing is extremely close to sales, and it almost creates a “hybrid body”, where Christensen was slowly transitioning into dual roles as she was “getting results, getting to know channel partners better and getting to understand their challenges”.

“When I was in distribution, we used to run a lot of marketing development fund lead generation campaigns,” she said. “Some of them worked, some of them didn’t and I think that’s when I started to venture into channel partners and see the bigger picture … sometimes it’s not just marketing.

“There is a lot more to it, also learning about the solutions, and learning how partners and vendors position it.”

This led to Christensen adjusting on how she ran marketing and also approaching end users to talk to them as well.

“Altogether, it allowed me to gather the knowledge where simply building marketing campaigns and focusing on lead generation wasn’t enough,” she said.

What really helped propel her further into a dual marketing and channel sale role was when she started to ask Cloudian senior director APJ James Wright about how things should work on a deeper level.

“We are a small team, we are a startup, I must admit, it was an ideal space for me to make that transition,” she said. “The more questions I was asking, the more my mentor James was saying … ‘right, you might be ready’.”

Christensen credits Wright as helping her to navigate this journey for me and providing her with the right challenges to help her understand and perhaps help bridge those gaps between marketing and sales.

Providing the right mentorship

Having good mentors is important to Christensen, just as important as providing strong mentorship across the marketing space.

“In my previous roles, I was running an internship program, which I hope benefited quite a few people, she said. “[Some] are currently in the industry, some of them in marketing [and] the majority of them ended up venturing more into the sales environment.”

This is something that Christensen is very passionate about, because she was lucky with the mentors and managers that she had in her life and “definitely would love to pass” on her knowledge to help thrive.

“Especially [as] I started my career relatively late,” she said. “I migrated to Australia at the age of 25 and I lived in Perth and worked in hospitality. I really started started my corporate career at over 30.”

For Christensen, it’s great to see younger people just out of university come into the industry, experiencing it in different roles, with different tasks.

“I mentor them and they are [also] my mentors in their own ways as well. It’s amazing how much you can learn from young people,” she added.