 Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE. Covering Women Transforming Technology 2017. Brought to you by VMware. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host. I'm joined by Colleen Copsay. She is the vice president, partner, go-to-market programs and incentives here at VMware. Colleen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. So you are a channel chief. That sounds so, that's a great title. I love it. Can you explain to our viewers a little bit about what you do? Absolutely, and maybe my mom will watch this because she still doesn't quite understand. Mom, are you listening? Okay. What I do. Channel chief is a wonderful opportunity to drive the sales strategy inside a technology vendor through multiple different partners who sell our technology around the world. What many people don't know in the technology industry is trillions and trillions of dollars of our sales go through partners. In fact, we even partner with ourselves. VMware partners with Google and Amazon and Dell and everyone else in the industry to help ourselves sell because customers don't buy a technology, they buy a solution. And so much like the retail industry where clothes are made by a brand, it's not necessarily always sold by that brand. It's sold by Nordstroms or Bloomingdales, et cetera. Same thing in technology. So my role as a channel chief is to manage those relationships. VMware has about 60,000 partners worldwide. And so our focus as a channel chief is how do I get those partners to sell our technology and not just sell it but deliver it and install it and architect it and put a whole solution together because VMware is often sold with many other technologies, the server side, the networking side, the storage side and put a solution together for our customers. So that's what I get up and think about every day is how do I get these partners to sell VMware? So you, it's a sales role. It is. And are there many other, and you're also a corporate channel chief. Are there many other women in these leadership roles? Yeah, not as much as I would like to see today but I think it's beginning to grow as a career that's well suited frankly for women. It is a corporate role in many cases and there's different kinds of channel chief. There's a field channel chief that's out there meeting with all the different partners, putting together the business cases and how can we sell more in the future? But my role and one that's really growing in the industry is a corporate channel chief. So we think through the incentives, almost like the comp plan for a sales person but it's what's the comp plan for a partner. How do we pay them? What behaviors do we want to reward for? What behaviors do we want to stop rewarding for? And how do we want to move the cheese as you will on the sales team that happens every year? It's a very natural thing but we're thinking about these for businesses versus individuals. Another piece is what's the legal requirements of working with us? What's the training requirements? Which technology do you need to know? How do we need to increase those technologies? So the wonderful thing is a channel chief really we touch the marketing department, the legal department, the finance department, the sales department, most importantly the business unit department that creates the technology. How do we sell it? So you're almost like a mini CEO within the company but if you do it on the corporate level it's also a role that doesn't require a lot of travel. And that seems to be one of the main inhibitors for women that I see in sales is the road warrior piece is something that just doesn't work for a lot of women. So being a corporate channel chief you can be involved in the strategy, doing the research, setting the direction but have a bit of more of a stable home life as well so you can balance work and home. Right and you can get to a certain point of influence in your career without having to be out there as much. Absolutely but I always refer to again as that mini CEO because you're really that hub and spoke you touch so many different departments and you're solving so many company problems that are really at the central piece. Hey it's amazing we've created networking virtualization how are we going to sell it? Who do we sell it with? What does it displace? What does it replace? How do we explain it to customers? Who was selling networking already that could help us do this? It's really it's a hub of everything. And because you're collaborating with all these different business units as you say gets your brain working in different ways too. Absolutely and not to be generic but having that collaborative spirit that many of us women have it really works well for you. You have to be able to understand and put yourself in the position of finance of the business unit of the legal team and be able to communicate with all of them okay this is how we're going to bring this technology to market. So for a viewer out there who says that sounds like something I'd like to do. How did you get started? How did you become a channel chief? Yeah and not so interesting story but I'll share with you anyways. We only want interesting stories coming. I came from a family that had a doctor and a teaching background for my parents so when I said I wanted to go into business I think they wanted to disown me somewhat and didn't really know how to guide me so I was really on my own went to the University of Washington Business School and really went to the career center and saw consulting and in my mind I'm like ah consulting I can try different things do different things and learn more about business to find my niche and it happened to be a channel consulting company based out of Seattle Washington. So I actually started as an intern and there are multiple different channel consulting companies that still exist especially in the Bay Area and Boston are two of the main headquarters of those and I got to see what is a channel strategist to do in hardware vendors, software vendors. I worked for Compact, I worked in HP, I worked in Ink To Me. I quickly learned that software had more money so that seemed like a good direction to go and there's a small group of folks that understand channel but they're very willing to train the next generation so it's a very niche really profession but if you understand it and if you listen to the partners and you bring back their voice within your vendor you can be very well respected in the industry as well. Now you're also on the Diversity Council here at VMware, what are some of the things that you're working on to make this a more inclusive work environment? Yeah, great question. Some of the things that we're working on within VMware that I think is very important especially because VMware has our engineering background is the math behind the problem statement. How are we doing as a company? We have created wonderful dashboards that really sit down with our leaders and really look at diversity. How many women do we have in the company? How many do we have at individual contributors all the way up into the vice president level? How many come in from a recruitment standpoint? How many do we promote and how many do we lose? And what I've found is sitting down with our leadership, male and female and looking at the math and the dashboards of where we stand as a company gives us a single foundation to start from and then figure out how are we going to continue to improve that. I'm sure as you know VMware has recently come out with our statistics of being 23% for instance female and then we're constantly looking at how can we improve upon that and we have educating people in the programs that we have, people of difference, our pods for instance. So we have a VM inclusion people of difference pod around women and that's when we get together and talk about how can we support each other? What are some tactics that we can come with to support each other even just in a meeting? You know you can sit in a meeting and you know that old adage of you can say something and then possibly a male repeats it and you weren't listening the first time but it's amazing to watch within VMware as now other women are trained to stop in that meeting, actually I think Colleen just said that so nice of you to repeat that. Handled in a nice, almost funny kind of way. That's not always easy to do though, it's not. That takes a deft touch. So are you also in those training sessions, is there sort of an EQ component to it? Absolutely and we practice. So we literally have groups of ourselves that we go through the training and we practice and we hold each other accountable and say in two weeks find one example where that happened to a colleague or yourself and how did you correct the situation or not correct the situation, let's talk about it. Why did you or didn't you? And holding each other accountable seems to be a big piece of I think the success at VMware because you can discuss the problem and have a support group of agreeing on what the issue is but not take action to fix it. And so those support groups and coming together and saying here's the issue and here's how I addressed it in my small way, in my one meeting and those death by a thousand cuts starts to stop and you find you have alliances with other women who are supporting women and we're all trying to come together to further the cause which is a great feeling. So I mean that this sounds as though things are the VMware is aware of this and is trying to improve the culture but Silicon Valley gets a lot of bad press particularly lately, particularly this last week of being an intolerant place or being sexist. Is it as bad as we're hearing? I've certainly heard some of the stories at some of the other tech vendors recently. I hate to think it's that way at every single company. I know the Uber story has recently come up that's pretty serious I think. Do I think everyone experiences it as a female at some level if it's whether it's the joke or the football talk or not feeling included or the cigar lounge? I think that happens to some extent everywhere. Do the seriousness of what we're hearing come out and the press happen everywhere? I hope not. I haven't had those types of experience but I think almost everyone has had a just a mispositioning of a statement that did offend or hey, how was maternity leave handled by male leadership? And there's something I'm pretty passionate about that we're beginning to discuss at VMware which is a reverse mentor. So we're really asking some of our male leaders to look at having a female or diverse candidate reverse mentor. So someone who's lower than you honestly in the pecking order telling you or being there as someone you can bounce something off of hey, I was thinking of doing this would this bother you as a woman? Or when they see you say something or do something or hey, did you notice you leader you had a panel and it was all men? And really having a relationship where they can have those conversations because sometimes what we're finding is the men just really aren't aware. And you want to think that they are and I think we're so super aware and more vigilant of it that they would be more aware but I think having the ability as a leader to learn from your team or someone specifically on your team that you have trust. But the people who have the reverse mentors aren't they already a self selecting group in the sense of they're already the ones who are aware that there are problems. I mean, I'm just thinking about it sounds like a great idea but how do you get that leader who maybe is a little more bullheaded or just unaware oblivious to say you need this you need someone who has a different perspective than you telling you how it is or telling you what his or her experience is. I think that's a great question. Something we're pretty focused on is diversity, we're not necessarily doing it to be nice. We're doing it for business outcomes. So I think the hope is if you have maybe the leaders who are self selecting who come and do the reverse mentoring or who are aware of their organization and how they need to improve. But what we can show is if they work on it over time they get better business outcomes. And in sales business outcomes is very clear and easy to see. So the teams that have the more diverse teams and lean in to the issue even if they were more self selecting if they have the better business outcomes if they have the better sales over time it becomes less of a hey the person who is bullish who doesn't want to need it hey we need you to do this to be nice it's more this person got better sales results than you did. So why don't we take a page out of what they did and try some of these things and I think if we can keep it on business outcomes that's part of the way that we can win. And sales that's a little easier than on the technical side. There's a clear ROI. Absolutely. You look at it. No and I think that that's a really good point because you do think of diversity training as kind of a squishy thing that you can't necessarily always quantify. Yeah. What are you seeing and what are you hearing from your colleagues your other channel chiefs in terms of what's happening? Great question. There's not enough of us. So I actually just met with four of them yesterday from Brocade and Riverbed and Cengard and we had a discussion of what's working or what's not working. I think we're seeing a better understanding from all of our peers on male and female. There's an issue. We're not diverse. The statistics are being published now. We're seeing companies come out VMware published where are we at? And you can just kind of look at the numbers and say we have a ways to go. So you're benchmarking yourself but then you're also benchmarking yourself against others. And I think more people are coming out and I think Facebook and Apple sort of started some of that trend but Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, they're all publishing now. They're a percent of leadership that is women. So I think we have an agreement on we've got an issue. We could see mathematically we have a problem. We need to improve that. I don't think some of the smaller companies have the assets and the resources to solve the problem yet. And they're looking at some of the larger companies are what are you doing and what tools are you developing? And how can we learn from you? Because when you talk to some of the smaller companies that maybe are more likely to have some of the female leaderships in those positions, they still don't know how they're going to solve this problem completely. Thinking about the top women in Silicon Valley or top women in the technology industry, the names we know that are in the press all the time, the Sheryl Sandbergs and the Ginny Ramities, who do you think are some of the unsung heroes? Oh, unsung heroes. In my world, in the channel world, I see a much smaller community of women. I see the women in VMware, frankly. I think Betsy and what she's done at VMware is her chief people officer. And really taking the issue on pretty head-on. And even to the point of having the women transforming technology event here at VMware and sponsoring it and getting Dell to sponsor it and Pivotal and the other sponsors, I think that's been huge. And that's been a journey watching her on as well. She's been at VMware 12 to 14 years, I think. And having a female founder of VMware wasn't an issue. You didn't think of it. That was actually one of the things used to recruit me here that I was very excited about at VMware. But over time, we saw things change and maybe the dynamics as we grew fast, diversity didn't necessarily grow. And she was the one I said, we need to stop. We need to be thoughtful about this. We need to think. This isn't going to get VMware the best business outcomes. And she's really been pushing the issue quite strongly at VMware and I'm in awe of her. And I don't see her disgust as much as Sheryl Sandberg and the luminaries out there. But I've been seeing her battles within VMware and she's been making a huge difference. Colleen Copsay, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me, I appreciate it. We're at Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll be right back.