Transforming Partnerships: Broadcom’s Approach To Elevating Customer Success

Broadcom is empowering its Expert Advantage Partners and delivering greater value to customers by reshaping its approach to collaboration. The company’s new strategy creates opportunities across the channel and redefines how partners and customers benefit from its solutions.

CRNtv host Sydney Neely speaks with Regan McGrath, president of Americas sales at Broadcom, to discuss how the company’s evolving strategy is transforming the channel.

Sydney: Regan, you’ve been at Broadcom for seven years now. Give us your perspective: What are you looking for when you work with partners?

Regan: Yeah, well, if you take a step back and look at our strategy, we’re focused on developing the technology that enables customers to deploy private cloud infrastructures.

Most of our customers are running in very siloed, heterogeneous environments. It’s a complex, multi-domain landscape that requires deep technical expertise. When you think about what partners excel at, it’s systems integration.

That’s really what we’re emphasizing. We’re also taking a very different approach compared to most vendors by prioritizing post-sales adoption. Most vendors are out there every 90 days trying to sell a new piece of software, and that often leads to shelfware. I think we’re one of the few companies actually interested in getting rid of shelfware.

We’re putting a lot of time and energy into incentivizing both our sales team and our partners to ensure the technology we sell is fully used and deployed. This is where Expert Advantage Partners come in. We need them to help integrate and deploy our solutions for customers. So, when someone asks what I’m looking for in a partner, I’d say deep technical expertise is our top priority.

Sydney: Great! Now let’s talk about the dramatic shift Broadcom is making with these experts. What’s changing as you move into the new fiscal year?

Regan: It really is a dramatic shift. In the past, VMware operated a pretty big professional services business. If you looked at the total professional services opportunity, they probably drove about 70 percent of it themselves, leaving about 30 percent to partners.

We’re looking to completely invert that. We want the vast majority of our professional services opportunities to be driven and owned by our partner community. It’s a big change and requires a lot of trust in our partners, but we think it’s a better place to be based on our strategy and goals.

This shift isn’t just about VMware products. It’s across the board. Any customer where a partner has the expertise to deploy resources is now an opportunity for collaboration, which is great for everyone.

Sydney: I can understand why this shift benefits the partners, but how will it benefit your customers?

Regan: The more opportunities we give our partners, the more technically competent they’ll become. And as they grow in expertise, our customers will benefit from having access to partners who are deeply skilled.

We’re also helping customers figure out which partners can address their business initiatives. In the past, customers often worked with the partner they bought their software from, but we’re taking a more active role in guiding them to the right partners.

IT is incredibly complex right now. Customers are struggling with the pace of technological advancements and the resources needed to address these challenges. This new approach connects customers with partners who have the expertise to meet those needs.

Sydney: So, you handpick these experts, and then what do you do to support them as they grow and expand their services business?

Regan: We’ve launched a new program called the Expert Advantage Partner Program, which focuses on giving our partners the training and tools they need, along with access to our customers.

Through our Insights platform at expert.broadcom.com, partners can promote their services and the integrations they’ve developed for specific customer applications. We’ve also introduced a next-level training program for top talent called Knights.

These Knights act as an extension of our technical team. They receive the same level of product knowledge and access to information as our own system engineers, allowing them to provide exceptional service to customers.

To learn more about the Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner Program, visit expert.broadcom.com.