HYDAR AL AMMAR , Senior Director , Strategic Alliances APJ at Seismic , a US headquartered company that helps marketing and sales teams fulfill their promise to drive revenue together . Al Ammar ’ s management philosophy focuses on building trust and taking great pride in maintaining transparency with colleagues and channel partners . He explains to us how Seismic is growing its investments and developing its channel business in the APAC and Japan region .

Describe your current job role and the parts that are somewhat challenging ?

As Seismic ’ s Senior Director of Strategic Alliances for the APAC and Japan region , I am responsible for building our partner ecosystem across the APAC and Japan region . This entails identifying potential partners , developing joint value propositions , creating a cohesive goto-market ( GTM ) strategy and ensuring strong collaboration between Seismic and our partners to help our joint customers optimise their customer experience and service capabilities , as well as improving sales and marketing alignment . With the rapid growth Seismic has experienced in my time with the company , we have needed to recruit across multiple countries in the region , focusing on different types of partners that can add value to our solution . While this has been challenging – particularly finding the right type and balance of consulting , referral , implementation and value-added reseller ( VAR ) partners – it ’ s also what makes my role exciting and fun , especially as we expand in or move to new markets .

Can you explain how your company works with channel partners ?

We have developed a partner programme that is tailored to various types of partners , whether they are value-adding , consulting , implementing or referring . With all of these partners , our priority is to establish a strong and cohesive joint GTM strategy which starts with a differentiated value proposition . We also look at ways to create awareness through joint marketing initiatives , while educating our respective frontline sales , customer success and marketing teams . Where technical training is required , we support partners through with Seismic University , which is a selfpaced training platform .

How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market ?

Combined with our partner programme , we are focused on ensuring Seismic is a natural extension to what they already offer , giving them sales and marketing enablement plus training capabilities to bolster and add to their existing services . That ’ s how we are able to serve as a differentiator for our partners as they go to market to win business . A lot of that comes down to building that joint value proposition I mentioned earlier , including flexibility in the fundamentals of our partnerships .

We also focus on enabling our respective sales teams in understanding this joint proposition and knowing when to bring our partners in to ensure we optimise the customer experience . We do this through consistent engagement with our teams and leveraging our own technology to ensure partners have access to the latest information , whether that ’ s marketing assets such as a one-pager , industry insights , pre-developed presentations or slides to incorporate into their broader messaging , etc .

Hydar Al Ammar , Senior Director , Strategic Alliances APJ at Seismic

INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 45 61