Hexnode Partner Summit 2021 – Key highlights

Hexnode’s inaugural Partner Summit has now concluded, not once but three times! Conducted in three separate time zones (EST, London Time and AEST), it would not be too far of a stretch to claim that it was a great global success! We must thank everyone who attended the summit and made it a lively event. Now, if for some reason you were unfortunate enough to miss it, worry not. Just read on for a quick walkthrough of everything that happened in Hexnode Partner Summit 2021.

A Newsworthy Keynote

The event kickstarted with an enlightening keynote speech from none other than Apu Pavithran, the Founder and CEO at Hexnode. Apu welcomed all the partners to the event. He also talked about the role of the pandemic in digitalization across the various industries and how Hexnode has been playing a huge part in promoting and enabling remote work. He then talked about Hexnode being listed as a notable vendor in Gartner UEM Magic Quadrant in the midmarket context.

This is a huge achievement for us. We couldn’t have done this without you. – Apu Pavithran

Apu went on to announce the next Hexnode User Conference – HexCon21. With HexCon20 being a smashing success, you can look forward to HexCon21 a bit earlier this year – on September 21. There were other important announcements covering new feature announcements, partnership programs, partner awards and more. Check out this blog for a detailed review of everything that was covered in the Keynote.

External sessions and talks

Talks between two entrepreneurs – Vinay Bhagat answers some questions from Apu Pavithran 

A Harvard graduate and a serial entrepreneur, Vinay Bhagat is a thought leader who inspires many. The session began with Apu introducing Vinay Bhagat, Founder of Convio and Trustradius and welcoming him to Hexnode’s inaugural Partner Summit. Vinay shared his journey as an entrepreneur and how he had always been interested in entrepreneurship from a young age. Convio was founded in the early 2000s, and Apu was very interested to know how Vinay managed to not only keep the company afloat, but also scale the company to significant growth. Vinay shared the challenges faced and how he solved those.  

When you have your eyes open, you see things.

Says Vinay, on coming up with one idea after the other for starting new companies from scratch. 

Capitalizing on digital opportunity by Sean Ginevan

At Hexnode’s Partner Summit 2021, we had Sean Ginevan, Head of Global Strategy and Digital Partnerships in the Android Enterprise team at Google, who gave a great and informative talk on digital opportunities that organizations can capitalize upon and some market trends and analysis.

Digital Transformation is here to stay. – Sean Ginevan

Sean argues the above with some very convincing stats. As a result of Covid-19, around 86 percent of US CEOS plan to increase investments in digital transformation over the next three years. IDC predicts that by 2022, 65 percent of CIOS would digitally empower and enable front-line workers with tools like AI, data and security in order to extend their productivity, adaptability and decision making in the face of rapid changes. He then talks about how your organization can use mobile technology to drive digital transformation. Ensuring that the right products are on the shelf, using AI for improving customer service are a couple of the methods you can find of use. Sean then discussed some mobile use cases that became relevant post-Covid-19 including the healthcare industry, logistics companies, and large global retailers. He also discussed what Android brings to the table for organizations and companies – built-in security, thousands of device types, applications for every usecase, robust enterprise device & app management with zero-touch deployment capabilities and more.

Many enterprise devices today aren’t managed. This actually represents an opportunity for US Hexnode Partners…  The challenge here is that without the right EMM foundation in place, it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible for organizations to realize the benefits that CEOs and CIOs alike are seeking from their digital transformation investments. – Sean Ginevan

The story of Michelle Ragusa-McBain

Michelle Ragusa-McBain is the VP of Global Channel and Digital Strategy at JS Group. She gave a candid and illuminating talk at the Hexnode Partner’s Summit, where she shared her awe-inspiring story of how she has been working in tech for over 17 years. She spoke of the importance of mentorship, diversity in the workplace, and how she continuously worked towards changing the world with technology. Michelle also shared some marketing tips. She emphasized the importance of social media and creating content that is relevant to the customers, through whitepapers, brochures, ebooks, collateral, infographics, webinars, podcasts, third-party analyst reports, etc. 

Michelle concluded her talk by encouraging women to pursue careers in technology. She stated the challenges faced by women and diverse groups in the industry and the importance of overcoming those very challenges. Quoting a powerful sentiment from Michelle:

It is in our diversity that we are stronger and more powerful together.

Tips for Client Acquisition for B2B Startups from Jennifer Poole

Jennifer Poole is the head of Client Acquisition at Publicize, a digital PR company. She dropped some golden nuggets of wisdom that you definitely cannot afford to miss if you are looking to build a PR strategy for your B2B startup.  Jennifer discussed the whole process in four parts:

1. Building your narrative – Here, Jennifer talked of the Golden Circle – Why you do what you do? How do you do what you do? What do you do?

She also discussed some quick facts about storytelling that would help you build your narrative.

2. Communicating effectively – Once you have your narrative down, Jennifer tells us to focus on communicating effectively with the audience. She shared a checklist that you can use to ensure that what you are communicating is properly received:

• Who is my audience? 
• What is my message? 
• What is the story that makes my message noteworthy? 
• What do I want people to do with my story? 

Jennifer also shared a media assessment checklist and gave some tips on how to be a good communicator.

3. Maximizing visibility – In this section, Jennifer starts by giving an intro to what actually PR is for growth. She emphasized on how you should focus on relevant exposure rather than obsessing over any exposure you can get.

Exposure for the sake of exposure? No, we do not do that in PR for growth. – Jennifer Poole

Jennifer then goes on to give us viewers an inside scoop on some excellent pitching guidelines like conveying why your story is important to the audience, not using overly promotional or jargon-heavy pitches, doing proper and intensive research before your pitch, and so on.

4. Building your sales pipeline – It is probably the most important section of the talk. Here, Jennifer talks about actually acquiring customers and shares some tips and tricks for the same. Now that you have learned to build a narrative, communicate it effectively and learned to pitch it to your leads, you would need to grasp what you want your audience to do with your story. For example, you may want them to subscribe, like, share, consult or purchase your product. Jennifer discussed various systems and processes to build your sales pipeline, including website content creation, CRM, getting pre-sales qualifications and more. Lastly, Jennifer shared some of her personal key sales strategies that she uses with her team.

Learning to leverage social media for B2B SaaS businesses with Kirsty Traill

The startup advisor at YP YEXT, Kirsty Traill gave an illustrating session ranging a number of topics – from defining your customer experience to understanding your customers. She talked about customer experience, personas, speaking through the voice of the customer and social customer support.

Customer experience means ensuring that your customers have a seamless series of interactions across all of the various touchpoints. – Kirsty Traill

Customer experience directly impacts revenue, and it is possible to measure how successfully a company delivers a customer experience that creates and sustains loyalty with Forrester’s CX Index Score.

Building a persona for the customer is very important.

Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

-Amazon Leadership Principles: Customer obsession

Kirsty also talked about the importance of using customer data to drive important business decisions. In the hour-long session, Kirsty packed a wealth of information including data and customer journey, data management maturity curve, customer support objectives, support workforce model, customer support evolution, social customer engagement framework, the importance of proactive messaging and other social media marketing strategies.

Digital Analytics for growth in B2B technology market by Michael Brito

Michael Brito is the EVP, Digital and Analytics at Zeno Group. He talked to us on leveraging digital analytics for growth in B2B tech market. Michael discussed the 1:9:90 model of influence, which says that within each market, there is 1 percent of the population that drives the conversation (influencers), 9 percent that shares it (Audience) and 90 percent (Enthusiasts) that consumes it. The enthusiasts are highly influenced by the influencers and the audience. He then talked about the economics of brand relevance. He also talked about media intelligence, the context of media, identifying influential journalists, identifying the right influencers, influencer mapping and more. He then concluded the talk by letting us know how to apply data to content, marketing and storytelling for data-driven marketing. Michael is happy to connect and share thoughts through email: britopian@gmail.com

Prioritizing frameworks by Andrea Saez

Andrea Saez is the Product Consultant and Co-Founder at The Product Dynamic, an organization that focuses on creating and supporting diversity in teams. Andrea gave us some insights into prioritization frameworks. She also discussed some of the popular frameworks available, why they do not help in the decision-making process and how to do things better. Andrea talked about the importance of realizing that prioritization is not a linear process. It is important to always start with a roadmap, a list of your objectives and what you hope to achieve. The next step is to test your hypotheses and experiment so that you start to understand your outcomes better. The process after that is the development backlog, where you understand the capacity and the output of your product. Foster conversations and discussions to help you make smart, capable decisions.

Learning about XaaS – Anything as a Service from Thiago Bolognez

Thiago Bolognez is the Director, Business Development, Strategic Partnerships at MobileXtra. In this session, Thiago talks about XaaS in a very interesting and illustrative manner. As Thiago says, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and he proceeds to show us the history and evolution of the as-a-service model through illustrations. As SaaS began to gain traction, companies started realizing that the cost of purchasing their own infrastructure, databases, expensive servers, applications and the IT staff required to maintain it – all could be reduced by moving to cloud. Now in 2021, XaaS is moving out of the technology realm. Thiago went on to give us some examples such as Delivery-as-a-Service, Space-as-a-service, Mobility-as-a-service, Transportation-as-a-service and Subscription-as-a-Service. He also shared some analytics and insights into future trends such as UCaaS – Unified Communication-as-a-service. He concluded by discussing one final as-a-service model – Mobility Management-as-a-service. As a Hexnode Partner, it is at the core of the mission at MobileXtra.

Capacity building and digital collaboration post-Covid for business expansion by Jibran Ali Khan

Jibran Ali Khan at Hexnode Partner Summit 2021 

Jibran Ali Khan is the Executive Director (APAC-EMEA) at SETI General Trading, UAE. He summarized the strategies to ensure a collaborative business expansion in the post-Covid world. 

Digital marketing is the most critical brand creation and promotion technique in the current market. As Jibran believes, if digital marketing techniques are up to the mark, there is a 90% chance to engage all potential customers and make them aware of the product and services. According to him, the long-term objective behind all calculated marketing strategies is to create brand awareness, establishment, credibility, popularity, and acceptability. He further discussed the key steps in building up an innovative workforce and the market skills to tackle the Covid’19 challenges. 

Adnil Puente talks about introducing Hexnode to large enterprises 

Adnil Puente at Hexnode Partner Summit 2021 

Adnil Puente is the COO at Integricity Technology. He talked on a variety of topics such as the difference in the buying process between SMEs and large enterprises, how enterprises buy solutions, and discussed a simple process to sell a solution to large organizations. He also shared with us on how to properly qualify for opportunities using the BANTC method.

BANTC method

Training Sessions by Hexnode Experts

We have quite a few marketing, sales, and customer success experts at Hexnode, who are a large part of Hexnode’s continual success. Hexnode’s Partner Summit had some of our experts giving comprehensive sales, product and customer success training on a selected range of highly relevant subjects for partners including:

• Partnership Training – One portal to manage them all
• Product Training – How to deliver the perfect demo?
• How to pitch Modern Desktop Management with MDM?
• Customer Success Training – The art of retaining customers
• Sales Training – How Hexnode sells Hexnode?
• Getting to know UEM – the niche and the players

Networking and Games

Any event would be dead without zero networking. We were lucky to have our attendees who made Hexnode Partner Summit 2021 a lively virtual space buzzing with activity. With exciting games like Guess it till you win it, our partners sure had a lot of fun in the summit.

Ending on a happy note

All good things have to come to an end, but the end of the Hexnode Partner Summit was a happy and satisfied one for both the Hexnode team and our attendees. Apu rolled out the metaphorical red carpet and announced the winners of the long-awaited Partner Awards.

We hope that our customers, our partners and all enterprise technology enthusiasts will continue to participate and enable us to have many more events, summits and user conferences.