Appfire’s EVP of Global Channel & Field Operations Colin Puckett leads the channel and field teams supporting partners and customers of the third-party platform solutions vendor. In an interview with Channel Insider, he shares how his team’s structure is rooted in mutual success, and what he’s keeping his eyes on in the second half of the year.
Why Puckett’s team oversees partner and customer success with a channel lens
The team Puckett leads oversees both partner growth and customer retention, an integrated approach that he says helps Appfire improve partner outcomes, deepen customer engagement, and scale more efficiently.
He says his team remains committed to partners and customers equally, as it works with its ecosystem to build more efficient workflows and user journeys.
“We’re still partner obsessed, and we’ll always be partner obsessed, but we also want to better understand our customers,” Puckett said. “Ultimately, that information will enable our partners to enable more significant outcomes for our mutual customers.”
To Puckett, the data and breadth of customer information Appfire has available to it is powerful, and he works hard to avoid it becoming a weapon between partners who may be competing for a customer’s business. Ultimately, his goal is to keep everyone on the same page and direct the entire ecosystem towards the best possible outcome for partners.
“There’s a possesiveness sometimes with partners who don’t want to see their vendor talking directly with a customer, and I can understand it to an extent. However, we are very clear and transparent in how we communicate with partners on our mutual customers, and that is how we see them,” Puckett said. “Plus, the greatest value in our ecosystem is found when we all obsess over the best outcome for the customer, and sometimes that possessiveness can keep us all from achieving the best outcomes together.”
His focus on both ends of the relationship stem from experiences he had when he was working with Amazon Business on bringing traditional suppliers to embrace the digital marketplace experience. To Puckett, there’s always a risk in doing the things the way they’ve always been done.
“I’ve seen companies everywhere get stuck in their ways because they spend so much time thinking about the way they want to sell and not spending enough time considering the way their customers want to buy,” said Puckett. “We have an important audit mechanism built into how we think through GTM, which is that we constantly ask what our customers actually want to see from us.”
In times of uncertainty, partners should focus on the predictable
Appfire builds solutions to address gaps in the user experience for some of the world’s biggest platforms, including Atlassian, Salesforce, monday.com, and many others. Between the macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties of the year plus the massive transformations the platforms Appfire builds on are undergoing, Puckett says he knows the year has been a bit hard to plan for to many partners.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever had an annual plan that’s held up fully to the whole year, but this year does feel especially confusing, and we hear a lot about ‘unprecedented times,’ and that’s absolutely difficult to keep ahead of,” Puckett said.
However, Puckett notes, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still more certain trends in the market that partners can prepare for and remain focused on. For example, Puckett says, his team remains committed to building the necessary infrastructure to follow the major platform players to the enterprise market. Atlassian in particular has made their upmarket ambitions qute clear, and Appfire wants to follow the path outlined by its largest platform partner.
“We want to help our partners shepherd enterprise customers through complicated migrations and the other needs specific to large organizations,” Puckett said. “That’s also a product initiative for us, as we work to ensure that things like larger seat licenses don’t lose functionality and we can better support enterprise users.”
“Scale is a term that can be over-used or at least over-generalized, and we’re very careful about what we mean when we say we want to scale. Right now, scale looks like following market expansion in the enterprise space, because we know the platforms we work with are doing that,” he continued.
How AI is changing the game, but not the playbook
Puckett notes an experience becoming true for anyone in tech: it’s impossible to have a conversation without discussing AI strategy, from the board room to the partner pitch. For Appfire, Puckett says the innovation is an opportunity to reassess its own solutions and streamline internal processes.
“I know this gets said a lot, but AI is really exciting right now,” Puckett said. “We’re learning new things internally all the time about where we can embrace it and how it will help us be more efficient. It’s also being integrated and developed into every platform we support, and so that’s given us a lot to think about.”
“For every app that might have been cannaolized by integrated AI in a platform, five new opportunities are created for us to then ensure customers are getting the most out of those new AI solutions,” Puckett added.
Puckett also knows that many of his partners and customers are being overwhelmed with demand for and information about AI-enabled solutions. To him, the curve of innovation gives partners an opportunity to focus on long-term strategic intitiatives for customers.
“There’s a kind of common saying with new innovation like this, and it says that the impact is often overestimated in the short term but actually underestimated in the long term. There’s a lot of noise right now, for sure, but this is absolutely something that will deeply impact ways of doing business far into the future.”
We spoke with Colin Puckett earlier this year about Appfire’s then-recent acquisition of Flow. Revisit that conversation to learn more about how Appfire supports its partners.