In the Season 4 premiere of The Platform Journey, host Avanish Sahai speaks with Jim Nairn, SVP of Alliances and Channel Ecosystems at WalkMe. WalkMe provides a digital adoption platform to let organizations measure, drive, and act to maximize their digital transformation.
Avanish and Jim discuss:
Guest: Jim Nairn
Since arriving in the Spring of 2021, Jim Nairn has served as WalkMe’s Senior Vice President of Alliances and Channels Ecosystems. Prior to joining WalkMe, from 2015 through 2021, Jim held the role of Vice President of Partner Sales for ServiceNow. Jim’s pedigree comes from a 20+ year career in Direct and Indirect Selling in the Telecommunications, Infrastructure and Software space, before moving into SaaS (with ServiceNow), in 2015. Jim has spent those 2+ decades working with a vast array of partners, traveling the globe and helping grow some of the biggest tech companies in the world. He continues to serve as an advisor for pre-ipo startups, consults a vast network of C-Suite executives and mentors several former colleagues, employees and associates, worldwide. Today, Jim lives just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Kati… and 2 daughters, Emma and Amelia.
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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Avanish: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of The Platform Journey. Today our guest is Jim Nairn. Jim is a dear friend, and former colleague as well. He is the SVP of Alliances in the ecosystem at WalkMe. I’ll ask him to talk a bit about what WalkMe is and what they do, since it may not be a name familiar to everybody. Jim, welcome to The Platform Journey.
Jim: Thank you, Avanish. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Avanish: Absolutely. Jim, give us a bit of your personal history. You’ve got a storied career, and you have been in some great, great companies. Start with that, and then we’ll talk about WalkMe and the WalkMe ecosystem strategy, etc.
Jim: Sure. I started my career a long time ago with a company called Lucent Technologies. I won't tell you how long ago, but it was a long time ago.
Avanish: Hey, mine is longer, so don’t worry! I’ve always worked longer than you. [Laughter]
Jim: I started my career there early on as a technician, way back when. We did all of our work for phone companies at the time, for Bell Atlantic and AT&T, companies like MCI and GTE that are long gone now. Then, throughout my career, I moved into project and program management, and then developed, I’ll say, an affinity for relationship-selling into accounts because of that.
I ultimately landed at a company called Presidio, back in the mid 2000s, and was on the partner side for a while. They were a big partner of EMC, Cisco, VMware and others. I started to work with some global organizations, Bank of New York being one of them. I live in Pittsburgh, so the beginning of that period of my life was spending a couple of weeks out of every month traveling to New York. I got to meet some great sales leaders from EMC, and eventually ended up on the Bank of New York Mellon team for EMC.
I was working for Joe Tucci and the Scannells and the guys at EMC, and more specifically for a guy called Joe Profeta, who ran the New York/New Jersey region for EMC. At the time, I was running a couple of the big financials—I was at Bank of New York Mellon first, and then PNC Bank out of Pittsburgh.
Joe had some ties to Kevin Haverty, who was the CRO of ServiceNow. For five years, I ran what we called the “STAT business,” which was the sell-to-and-through business at ServiceNow, culminating with a period in the 2020 time frame when I started to do advisory work for some startup companies—one of which was WalkMe. Through that engagement, I ultimately decided to come over to WalkMe.
Avanish: Awesome. You’ve mentioned a few legends in sales: Joe Tucci, Kevin Haverty. I mean, these folks are truly legendary. You’ve had a really interesting set of roles, of which, obviously, a big part is sales—but you also mentioned relationships.
Describe what WalkMe is, first of all. Where do you fit? It’s a fantastic story. I’ve known the company for a while, but I don’t know that all listeners would. What is WalkMe?
Jim: Sure. WalkMe is what we call a digital adoption platform. What that really means is, any company that’s of a certain size still uses software every single day. Everybody’s become a technology company, whether they wanted to be or not. WalkMe looked at the fact that people are using best-of-breed technologies and realized that people seem to be the breakdown point in change projects and transformation efforts that aren’t successful, because there’s a human element to it that we so often forget. We’re all using best-of-breed, so where do we fall down? Why do three-quarters of all transformation projects not meet the success criteria that we’d hope that they’d meet? A lot of that is the human factor: whether those folks are not getting what they wanted out of that technology, or whether the process was broken, or whether there was some misinformation put into the process.
WalkMe is a sort of a veneer that sits over the top of applications to help people achieve the intended outcomes of that technology. Part of the appeal for me, when I started doing advisory work, was that it was hard for me to put my finger on what the TAM was for a company that worked on any web-based application. It was probably pretty sizable.
[WalkMe] was also digitizing a very analog approach to learning, and learning in the flow of work. That’s something that is so critical for us now, in terms of why anyone should care what version of a particular software they use, or what latest release has come out, when they’re just trying to achieve a goal. We help them utilize the intended use of that technology to the fullest extent of the investment.
A lot of companies can do that through virtual agents or in-app guidance, but none of those work on other applications as well. The experience isn’t exactly aggregated, and that’s really where WalkMe shines. On top of that, they also glean insight from the analytics portion of the platform, which is almost like behavioral analytics. We can see when people fall out. We can see where they’re having trouble. And through AI and machine learning, we can help them achieve those goals with very little interaction with humans.
Avanish: That’s, again, digitizing an analog process. I think that’s pretty key. All of us who have been in the software business, particularly in the SaaS world, we always talk about adoption and understanding where and how things are working and not working. It makes tons of sense, finding the connection between different web-based applications. We all do the chair swiveling—how do you make that work more seamlessly? It makes tons of sense to me.
So, you joined WalkMe. Your charter is to build out the ecosystem. Talk a bit about where it was coming from when you came on board, and where you and the team are taking it. I think it’s a pretty phenomenal story.
Jim: I guess it goes back to those conversations. When I first engaged with the company, they were pre-IPO. They wanted to understand what a partner ecosystem should or could look like at the time of IPO. It was really about making the investment. There’s always the chicken and egg discussion that happens when it comes to investing in an ecosystem.
The timing couldn’t have been better. We couldn’t foresee the fact that the market was going to take a turn. The market, as you know, has been a little fickle in the last couple of years. Whether they wanted to see operating leverage, whether they wanted to see a reinvestment in sales, whether they wanted to see a path to profitability—all those things have been conversations in the last few years. In a head-winded market, I think that in creating that ecosystem, you create an extensibility through sales and delivery motions with the ecosystem that allows you to not put things on your bottom line. It allows you to create that extensible platform with and through the key partners.
I was lucky enough to work with a lot of those partnerships at ServiceNow and bring those to bear, in terms of alignment on operating model, segmentation model, compensation, and driving the right behavior. But it was really [hard] to do that. It was [challenging] to get companies off of that analog process of adoption and get them looking at being able to sell software and attach services to it. We had a GSI-first mentality, through which we have developed several different routes to market, and we will key in some of those routes to market as we turn the corner here.
Avanish: Yeah. Super thoughtful approach to transitioning what I imagine was a more traditional direct-sales model, right?
Jim: That’s right.
Avanish: [And to] educating the partner ecosystem and the prospective partner ecosystem, then starting to execute with them. You’re in the journey, and you’ve been there a couple years, is that right?
Jim: I’ve been here two years [as of] this past February. I took a month off when I was leaving ServiceNow. [As of the time I left ServiceNow,] I had 26 direct reports, and Covid was at its height. On the people management side, I’m a passionate leader in terms of my team—but Covid changed the landscape of a lot of things, one of those things being people management and the things that they were going through at the time.
I had a couple of stipulations when I joined WalkMe, with their former CRO. One was that I wanted no direct reports for the first year. I wanted a break from people management. [Laughs] But I also wanted to be able to glean some insight into what was working and what wasn’t working. Ultimately, that second one was, “If you’re serious about this, I want you to consider not growing your professional services organization. If we’re going to lean in here, let’s really lean in.”
I was fortunate enough, as they were transitioning CROs, to be a part of the interview staff for our newest CRO. When I interviewed him, he asked, “What does your longevity look like with this company?” And I said, “That depends on you and your propensity to work with partners.” Luckily, he was spot on. He had an extensive history working with and through the partner ecosystem, so we’ve become not only fast friends but also respected work agents with one another, in terms of how we’re going to drive the company to be a partner-first company.
Avanish: I love that. I think, from a strategy perspective, about establishing that framework and that mindset. That’s something we often talk about. This cannot be an isolated motion. It has to be in concert with the rest of the strategy, and that only works if there’s alignment in the C-suite, even at the board level. It sounds like that was job one.
Jim: It was. We rode that knife edge of how to show the return while it’s still being an investment. The definition of investment is that it happens before the return, so we had to take some quick wins and really monetize as quickly as possible while still showing back to the business that we were monetizing in a credible way. That’s how you bring the C-suite onboard to believe it, and to see that it really is a true extension of the sales and delivery arm.
I knew that the requests around the PS organization weren't necessarily going to happen, but it was about putting them in that mindset that you just spoke about. It was an intended thought process change for them, I think, that we were able to bring on a CEO and the board with that thought.
Avanish: Yeah. Look, I’ve known you for a long time. I know you were very metrics-driven. What can you share about the metrics that you used to measure impact? What was it, baseline, when you started, how has it evolved, and how are you tracking it? Whatever you can share would be terrific.
Jim: I think it’s pretty simple. They were toying with ideas around pipe generation and things like that in the early days, before I got here. I think what you get when you compensate people on pipe gen is some bad pipe. Then they switched to only establishing sourced as the anchor for everything, and that’s true too.
What we did was create a model that was a hybrid approach in terms of compensating the right behavior. We didn’t want people leaving a situation with a customer just because somebody was doing delivery and they weren’t a part of that process, but they weren’t necessarily sourced. The team would exit that if it wasn’t listed as sourced, so we started tracking things by sourced and influence.
All due respect to the people that came before me, because they had a really good definition for what is truly sourced revenue. We were able to build on that and decide that we’re still going to anchor on it, but we’re going to compensate teams in a more creative way, to give them opportunities to still be effective with their customer outcomes through the partner ecosystem.
Our former CFO used to call the partner business when I got here “nascent,” which is a word that I’m not a big fan of. [Laughs] It was single-digit growth from probably 2017 to 2021. We made some wholesale changes in 2021, and we saw that growth shoot up to almost 40%, or just over 40%, in 2022. We’re looking to expand on that in 2023.
We saw a huge uptick with that GSI-focused model, and we continue to make announcements quarter over quarter on earnings, with new global partnerships. I just made another one today. We have our anchor partnerships that are very strategic to us in nature. We’ll continue to nurture and grow those, and activate the next group down as we continue. Through that, we’ve been able to open up some other channels in terms of MSP and ISV and OEM and other opportunities.
Avanish: You went where I was going to go next. When we think ecosystems, it is really the connection across multiple categories, right? I think in the old world of traditional partnerships, it was very much a siloed approach: you’ve got the resellers, the distributors, MSPs, ISVs, tech, GSIs, regional SIs, etc. They didn’t really collaborate much. They didn’t really coexist well, or co-innovate. I think what you’re doing, if I can put words in your mouth—but I’d love to hear your version of it—is starting to really think about how, ultimately, these all need to work together in some way, shape, or form. Talk a bit about how you’re setting that vision and strategy.
Jim: Well, you can’t have an identity crisis. That’s one thing. When a company is a thousand people strong, as we are now, you’re at an inflection point. There are three types of people that do what we do. There are people that want to be working with 25 guys in a basement, people that want to turn that company into an enterprise company, and then there are folks that just need to be in a big company.
We didn’t have an identity crisis. We knew we wanted to be an enterprise company. We knew we wanted to live in the VLE (very large enterprise)/LE(large enterprise) space. That has to be a firm decision that you make early in the process, to say we’re going to try to add value to these companies that are living in that space (which for us is the GSIs). That has to be an intended use of your time.
We established a way to monetize that as quickly as possible, to be able to show that return. Then that lends itself to other routes to market, so we started to open up other things. Now, at the stage we are at, a lot of what we do is creating insight for other ISVs and tech alliances that we could build integrations with, and we want to do those things. But is that the fastest path to monetization? Or is the fastest route to monetization working with those GSIs that have those practices already embedded? We already have centers of excellence built out with them. Let’s attach ourselves there while we go and build those tech integrations. So we’re able to show the monetization first and then come back to the tech integrations almost secondarily.
Avanish: I think that’s a brilliant way of thinking about alternative approaches. Rather than saying there’s the heavy lift of integration and technology and then trying to prove it out, you’re saying we already have these relationships with some of the global SIs. By the way, for what you do, they’re kind of a natural convener to bring it all together because they are the ones deploying the applications, and the integrations across those applications, and so on.
Jim: That’s right. Again, you can’t have an identity crisis. We’re not good at these things. We’re not good at putting in the delivery of these application platforms; they are. We’re not industry-focused the way they are; they have decades of knowledge and thousands of employees to bring to bear what we need in terms of a force multiplier to attach ourselves to that revenue.
It also is important to understand how they deliver services. I really pushed the team to understand the differences and nuances between those. We’re not trying to make them deliver services the way WalkMe would deliver services, but to add WalkMe as a pillar in which they deliver services—as a nuance to that capability. We’re not going to change a 700,000-person company. We’re just going to hope that they add us to the mix in a way that’s rooted in best practices that we can provide them.
Avanish: Yeah. Stepping back a bit from WalkMe… Again, we’ve worked together, so I know more about how you operate than most people. [Laughter] You’re probably one of the best in the world at developing a motion that I don’t think has been super common, but when it works, it’s magic: the managed service providers (MSPs). You ran that initially for one partner, then multiple partners, and most of the biggest partners for ServiceNow. I saw that motion and was in awe of how you executed it.
Jim: I can’t take all the credit for that [Laughter]
Avanish: Of course, there was a team, but I think you were the quarterback that coordinated that team, and I had the privilege of being on the sidelines watching as one of the coaches. It was just amazing.
Talk a bit about that motion. I don’t think everybody knows or puts that into their portfolio—they talk to resellers, more traditionally—but the MSP motion is one that I think is often underrepresented, maybe even undervalued. Talk a bit about how you structured those.
Jim: Well, it was a motion that was new to me when I arrived at ServiceNow back in 2015. Eight and a half, nine years ago, when I started having conversations with them, I flew to Boston to meet with the worldwide head of sales. He asked me what position I was interviewing for, and I said “I don’t know.” I didn’t know what was available at that time.
Avanish: [Laughs] Sounds familiar.
Jim: I said, “I’m here to see if I can help this company grow.” It was something that was very rooted in selling.
As I said, my entire history had been selling, and relationship selling, up until that point. There was an opportunity to go work with a company, an Indian service provider called HCL. My predecessor had done a fantastic job of setting them up through an MSP route to market, which was a new motion for me. Basically, you’re selling to a partner where they are the customer, and they’re extending third-party use right to an end client. It allows them to monetize the IP by adding their own flavor of services, but they’re still the administrator of that outcome. It allowed us to create a whole selling motion that was incremental to the company.
What we do so often in alliances and channels is already a part of what we’re doing as a natural selling motion anyway. Candidly, I’ve seen a lot of companies over the last two or three years—since the pandemic started—move away from the partner motion. I think that that’s because so much of their business was heavily just influence, or sell-with, and referral-based, and that overhead becomes difficult.
We were very prescriptive, in the sense that we wanted to also add value as incremental revenue to the company when I came here. That was something that started in my time at ServiceNow, where we were adding incremental revenue that you can land in a global house account, which helps the company, accretive to what you’re doing from a sales perspective.
It needs quality sellers to do it. It can get unwieldy. If you’re not careful, it can be difficult to go through in terms of the structure. You hit a lot of potholes along the way, but it can be a huge business. It culminated in 2020—the business that I ran was just under half a billion in revenue for ServiceNow. It had started probably in the $30 to $50 million range when I joined. We saw it really pop there, and it’s something that we’re going to bring to bear here at WalkMe as well.
Avanish: One of the things we’ve talked a lot about is your customer empathy. You try to understand their business lines, their service lines. Often, when we talk GSI, we almost immediately go to the consulting,implementation, and advisory work. The reality is, a lot of these firms—not all of them, but a lot of them—have business lines exactly to your point about running this on behalf of the customer and adding their services, their IP, their integrations, to create a more complete solution. You’re growing the pie, right? That’s something that people often don’t necessarily understand or include in their strategy.
Jim: It’s not necessarily a natural motion. Certainly for the revenue organization, it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that you’re going to put the onus on someone else to sell the value of your company. But getting back to that identity crisis, you have to maintain that you’re not selling an outcome when you’re a software company. You’re selling a solution or a platform that hopefully drives to an outcome. The only folks that can really drive an outcome are those who are attaching broad-based services to that.
How do you become such an integral part of that, that the customer realizes value outside of just the core thing that you’re selling? Very rarely does that happen. There are a lot of companies that call themselves platform companies, but to me, that’s the mark of a platform company. I’m not just going to realize a value or realize a savings on what I’m buying specific to a software, but also in other areas of the business. Sometimes that’s hard to quantify.
At the end of the day, especially when you’re in a head-winded market and everyone’s looking to reduce costs, gain time back, and become more efficient, it doesn’t matter what the market’s doing. Everybody’s about efficiency right now, and so we marry very well with the ServiceNows of the world, the Celonises of the world, that are truly trying to underpin technology and workflows to create a more efficient model. We’re just doing it on the people side, which allows us to also be in that discussion from the perspective of a creative route to market, and a creative way to transact.
Avanish: Love that. Jim, again, your insights are awesome. Now, let’s step back a bit. I know a lot of folks are looking at career aspirations, and how they can have more expanded roles and influence. Your journey from individual contributor, to manager, to now an SVP at WalkMe has been pretty phenomenal. What kind of advice or guidance would you have for someone who is saying, “I want to be the next Jim?”
Jim: Well, I don’t think anybody wants to be the next Jim. [Laughter] But I appreciate the sentiment.
There was a gentleman that we both know who was at ServiceNow for a number of years, who was a guy that I worked for. I’ve gotten a few good compliments from people that I’ve remembered over the years, one of which was from him. He said, “He’s probably the most authentic person I’ve ever met.”
I don’t really change how I talk, whether it’s the person cleaning the restrooms or the CEO of a company. I think bringing authenticity and realism to what we do, and a human aspect to what we do, is critical. I’ve maintained no attrition on my team in the last year or so now, and in this dynamic market, that is probably the biggest feather in my cap that I’ve had. That is, I think, due to the fact that I want to inform them. Knowledge is really key when things are happening in the market. Things are happening at a company level that a lot of times we look at in a hierarchical manner. We’re all adults that do this, for the most part, and giving people the information to feel like they know what’s going on puts people at ease. I try and do that in an authentic manner.
Another compliment that I got early on in my career was from the worldwide head of sales at ServiceNow. He said that the gentleman I had mentioned, Joe Profeta, had reached out to him before I started working for ServiceNow, and said, “This guy’s on the upswing of his career.” When he told me that in the interview, it was something that I started bringing into every interview that I did after that discussion.
I’ve interviewed thousands of people over the years. I always look for those that are still on the upswing of their career. I don’t necessarily care what drives a person—if they want to be the best father, if they want to be the best provider, if they want to be the best salesperson or the best partner advocate. As long as they have that drive, I can find a way to connect to them. It’s the people that don’t have drive that I can’t really afford to spend time with.
For me, it’s bringing authenticity. It’s informing people—even to a point of discomfort—but being authentic in the way that you deliver that information, and making sure that they feel like they understand what’s happening, especially when you’re experiencing challenges. Over the last couple of years, we don’t work from home anymore. We live at work. Gone are the days of somebody saying, “Sorry to bother you after hours,” or “I’m sorry to bother you late at night.” Those things don’t happen anymore. We’re all available 24/7. That’s a tough transition that we had to make.
Make sure that you connect with people first. My philosophy is, you can either make people do a good job for you, or you can make them want to do a good job for you. I always try and be that second person.
Avanish: Wow. What a fantastic note to end on. Authenticity, I can attest to that, you are one of the most authentic people I’ve ever had a chance to…
Jim: I appreciate that. I learned a lot of it from you too.
Avanish: Well, my friend, we are all pulling in the same direction, so much appreciated. I’m delighted we had a chance to have this conversation. Best of luck in your transformation of the WalkMe ecosystem.
Jim: Thanks so much. Appreciate you having me, and thanks to you and your team. It’s been great.