Co-Selling with Instructure

Okay. So hello, everyone. I'm excited to talk to you today about Instructure's co sell partner program and how it can unlock mutual growth for, us, Instructure, and our partners. Just a quick introduction of myself. My name is Huynh. I'm the director of business development at Instructure, in the partner sector team, specifically leading and managing our co sell partner program.

And hello, everyone. I'm Summer Walters, and I lead the partner co marketing function here at Instructure. And what that means is I work with our partners on planning and executing our joint co marketing campaigns within the tiers. And before we move on and have Hoon, deliver this presentation, I just wanted to go through a couple of housekeeping, things to share with you all. One, this, webinar is being recorded, so you will be able to access it after we share this over via email, within the next couple of days.

It will be directly shared to you via email. Secondarily, please make sure that all of your questions are put in the q and a section of, the platform here, which is at the bottom. You can see chat is over at the left, and q and a is over to the right. Please put all questions there. We will have a q and a at the end of this webinar to go through those questions.

If they are easy for us to answer, I can do that, just by answering within the q and a. Please watch that as well, but we will have a q and a at the end of his presentation, to answer all of your questions. And with that, I'm gonna pass it back over to Hoon, and let's get started. Okay. Thank you, Summer.

So before we dive into the details about co sell, I wanna make sure we're all aligned on what we mean by co sell at Instructure. So co selling is a joint go to market partnership program where Instructure's go to market teams are selling approved partner products or solutions directly to our customers using, Instructure's contract. The revenue from these sales is then shared with our partners. So that's what we mean by co sell at Instructure. Here are some of the things you should know about Instructure's global reach and partner ecosystem to understand the power of co selling with Instructure.

First of all, Instructure is the number one market leader in higher ed and K-twelve in education. And Canvas in K-twelve is used in all fifty states. Instructure has over eight thousand global customers in two twenty three countries. And the Instructure community also has more than two point two million active educators. And over eleven hundred EdTech companies are part of the EdTech Collective.

On average, there are over thirty million LTI launches daily via Canvas, really showing the power of our partner ecosystem. So the power of co selling with Instructure comes with several benefits. You can expect a seamless user experience via us offering our integrated solutions to our shared customers, an accelerated sales cycle selling through Instructure's existing contracts, and of course, enhanced credibility through a branch association. Plus, you'll gain access to Instructure's extensive global customer base and benefit from joint go to market collaborations. Coselling also means, co marketing with Instructure as well.

So I'm gonna let Somer kind of talk more about what we mean by co selling and aligning co marketing efforts to driving pipeline for co sell. Sure. Thanks, Hyun. When you're co marketing with Instructure, you can expect access to our marketing channels. And this represents our reach and visibility within those channels, which are these four channels here that are represented in this slide.

So in the community, as mentioned in a slide above, we have two point two million users in our Canvas community. We have a hundred and sixty thousand social followers, via across LinkedIn and x, both in the Canvas and the Instructure handles. We have about twelve thousand monthly newsletter subscribers, across four regions, and in in the NorAm region, k twelve and higher ed, with a an open rate that's fifteen to twenty percent above benchmarks. And we are the number one world's most visited Edu site, and our study hall, which is where we have a blog, is where, global visitors join. So as you can see within these channels, you have, high reach and visibility with Instructure, customers and prospects.

So when you're comarketing, these marketing channels will be leveraged for driving pipeline for co sell. Back to you, Hoon. Alright. Thank you. So before we dive into the details of the program, I wanna give you a little context, about Instructure's co sell partner program.

We first launched the program last year as a way to see the potential of co selling with our partners. The idea was simple. We know that Instructure can't build everything and to fully meet our customers' needs, we have to work with you, our partners, to complement our offerings. So last year, we certainly saw the potential of co selling with, our early set of cohort of partners. We also learned a lot, which also helped us identify three key areas to improve for this new version iteration of the program.

We focused on three key areas, so incentives, quality control, and internal alignment. When it comes to incentives, we realize that we need to effectively incentivize our go to market teams. So that would be our sales reps and customer success managers to make sure that their time and effort, is rewarded and incentivized to not only sell in structured product, but additionally also our partner products as well. So with this new iteration of the program as we were thinking about what would what do we need to refine in terms of incentive structure? We did a lot of internal surveying to figure out what that looks like. And as we go through the details of the program, you'll get to see how our teams are incentivized to, sell your products to our customers.

The second area that we focus on, refining and improving upon is quality control. What we found last year as we went to market, with our partner products, what we realized was our customers were expecting our partner products to be on par in terms of the standards and the quality around technical to integration to accessibility standards to privacy and security practices, making sure that all of those standards that they expect of Instructure products are also reflected into the partner products that we're selling to them. So with that, with this new iteration of the program, we are introducing, essentially a set of prerequisites. And just and the intention behind that is to make sure that your products are set up for success so that when we do go to market, not only our customers are confident about your solutions, but also our go to market teams, will be rest assured that, you know, they'll have the confidence to, sell and position these partner products, to our customers knowing that they're trusted and vetted. The third area that we also focused on improving is internal alignment.

So moving forward, any partner products that we are evaluating for co sell, we wanna make sure all of our internal teams that are involved in making sure that these co sell partner products are, essentially aligned and that we are all confident, in positioning these partner products to our customers. We wanted to make sure that now we have an evaluation process across customer success, sales, product marketing leaders to evaluate, these solutions. And essentially, all of these teams have to approve, in order for us to approve a partner product for co sell. So with this in mind, let's talk about what the path to co selling with Instructure looks like. So it's important to know that, as I mentioned before, partners must go through a rigorous vetting process to ensure that their solutions meet the technical evidence accessibility and privacy standards our customers expect.

So step one, we are asking, our partners to enroll and maintain, the certified tier or professional tier program that is part of our in, instruction integration tier program. Within this program, the certified and professional tier, these tiers provide strategic and technical and go to market support to help your solutions meet EdTech industry standards and stand out to education buyers and essentially help you reach that co sell readiness stage. Step two, we wanna make sure that our partner pack products or solutions pass Instructure's privacy and security assessment. What this means is we'll be sending a questionnaire to make sure, asking kind of what your current privacy and securities, practices and standards are. Based on that, we'll give an assessment of whether you pass that assessment.

Now if you already have an active SOC two type two report or an ISO two seven zero zero one certification, it's very likely that you will pass our assessment. So this is what we would recommend in terms of, working on towards getting a SOC two type two or an ISO two seven zero zero one certification. Step three, we wanna make sure that your solutions, obtain a Canvas certified integration. So what this means is making sure that your solution is seamlessly integrated with either, you know, Canvas or a relevant Instructure product. So everything from, up to up an up to date LTI one dot three integration, making sure that your solution has dynamic registration enabled and, etcetera.

Sometimes a Canvas certified integration might not be relevant, especially if it's an integration with our other two core products, which is, Mastery and then also Parchment. That would mean any relevant API integrations there is something that we we we would be taking a look at. Step four, we ask also that our partners provide a valid SL level four or level three certificate or equivalent issued within the past four to four years. So this is intent essentially to show the efficacy of your solutions to driving especially student learning outcomes. So this is one of the requirements as well.

Step five, we also wanna make sure that your solution supports either the WCAG two point one or two point two level a accessibility standards. In step six, we also, ask our co sell partners to maintain the required sponsorship level, so silver, gold, or higher at an InstructureCon or relevant regional instructional Instructure event. And this is all with the intention of leveraging these events instructional events to drive visibility and pipeline, during our co sell engagement. So once all of your once all the once you meet all the requirements, partner products undergo a strategic and product market fit evaluation, for the two different tiers of cos our partnership that we offer, which is the cos our authorized or preferred tier, which I will speak to, a little bit later, in the later slides. And, again, this evaluation process involves our product and sales and customer success and marketing team leaders to review your solutions.

And, essentially, all of those stakeholders, will either approve, and then also figuring out whether your products or solutions land in the authorized or the preferred tier of co sub ownership. And finally, once you are approved for co sell, we will then kind of, we will then kind of go into the contracting phase where partners will agree to the relevant standard co sell terms, including, all the revenue share terms, and also making sure that we're agreeing upon what the implementation the post sale implementation process looks like, and then also, rules of engagement in terms of how we, provide customer support, and then also, aligning on how we, collaborate on renewals. And, of course, as a final step, once we sign the Coastal agreement, then we are approved and ready for Coastal. So with that, wanna dive a little bit deeper into, the two tiers of co sell partnerships that we offer. And these were designed, around, essentially, the different growth strategies of our partners.

So we have two tiers. So we have the auth cosol authorized or preferred tier. The cosol authorized tier operates on a pull model. So think of this as where your solutions are essentially sold to our customers when our customers are specifically asking for that type of solution or a need as identified during our sales reps or CSMs, a day to day engagement with our customers. The co sell preferred tier uses a push model.

So think of this as more of a very proactive, collaborative, co sell motion where this involves joint planning and execution of sales and marketing efforts to our customers. And a little bit more details, into the each of these tiers. So the cosol authorized tier has a revenue share of twenty eighty. So twenty for Instructure and eighty for our partners. What this also means is the revenue share portion essentially becomes quota relief credit for our sales reps and then pipeline generation credit for our CSMs.

So this is the way in which our go to market teams are incentivized, to sell our partner products to our customers. In terms of the marketing and sales support that you can expect for the authorized tier, so marketing support for, for this tier includes a listing on our Canvas apps page and also our EdTech Collective marketplace, and then also, a self serve co branding toolkit that will be available for for for your use. In terms of sales support, this all this includes the making sure that your partner your products, are included in in structural led opportunities, also our our our responses to RFPs or tenders, and then also a listing in instructors go to market teams enablement chain channels, and then also ongoing mentions of your products in our Instructure's monthly co sell insights newsletter, which get distributed to our go to market teams. For the co sell preferred tier, the revenue share that you can expect, we offer two different options. One is a fifty fifty split, where, again, the revenue share portion becomes the quota relief credit and pipeline generation credit.

We also provide an option for, a flat fee per unit sold model. So what this means is, essentially, once you are approved for co sell, and if you are interested in this specific model, Instructure and the partner, we would enter into discussion to figure out what this flat fee should be. But once we determine mutually agree upon this flat fee, essentially, then Instructure would, pay this flat fee out to the partner per unit of your product sold. And this could be structured by FTE band. So for a certain FTE band, it could be a certain flat fee, and then we can kind of structure it that way.

With this specific revenue share model, the entire deal size essentially becomes the quota relief credit and pipeline generation credit for our go to market teams. For this tier, the support in terms of marketing and sales, you can expect all the support that you get from the authorized tier plus additional marketing and sales supports that are listed in here. So for marketing on the in the preferred tier, this includes joint sales online marketing campaigns, blog and social posts, live webinars, and then also developing joint case studies. In terms of the sales support, this includes coordinated sales plays, direct engagement with our Instructure teams, and then also the ability for you to deliver live enablement sessions, to our teams, account mapping exercises to really figure out what are the accounts that we wanna target together, and then also sharing, more kind of extensive sharing of our pipeline to make sure that we are tracking our efforts together and making sure that we're driving revenue, successfully for for Cosell. So those are the two different tiers that we offer.

And if you are interested in learning more and wanna get started on your journey to becoming eligible for co sell, there are two ways of going about this. You might already have an assigned senior, business adviser or a partner success manager. If so, you can definitely just reach out to them directly, to get started on this journey. And if you don't have any, SBAs or PS on the side, you can use this QR code link here. This essentially, gets you to our instructor partner website.

It is a form that you can fill out. There's a specific question, that asks about why you're interested in, partnering with Instructure. There's a drop down menu option which says co selling with Instructure. If you, select that option, one of our representatives will reach out to you to follow-up and then get you connected to the right folks to get you started on this journey. Here's also a useful resource, essentially summarizing a recap of all of the information that I've shared with you today about the COSO program.

So feel free to click on this, or on save this QR code, to access this resource. Another important, promotion that I wanna talk to you about, is for those of you who have attended this webinar or also have attended the partner summit, we are offering a special limited time promotion, where we are providing a discount on our certified tier program. So that is one of the prerequisites of becoming a co sell partner. So for the certified tier, we're providing a twenty percent discount. And what this means is if you sign up for the certified tier by September twenty fifth, you'll be able to, redeem this twenty percent, discount.

And now we have some time for q and a. Just as a reminder, if anyone has any questions, please click on the q and a box and put in your question. I have a couple for you, Hoon. Okay. Let's see.

We have the first question is, could you go down this road for LTI custom development services as we do a lot of this work for Instructure customers, or is this only intended for established products within market? I might need some clarification on that. Yeah. If if someone whoever wrote that question could clarify the question, and then we can maybe work on another question for now. Okay. Okay.

So for for the Canvas certified integrations For the LTI integration, can you certify for the entire company or just for the product? That's a great really great question. It's on a per product basis. And also for cosol as well, we are evaluating on a per product basis. Okay. Great.

Do we have do we have to have a certified or pro tier to co sell? Yes. So, yeah, as I mentioned before, one of the prerequisites to becoming eligible for COSL is to enroll in either the certified tier or the professional tier program. And again, within that tier program, we provide different support and benefits to actually, essentially, get you to, meet all the different requirements, that are listed as well. So that's definitely a prerequisite. If you are interested in the authorized tier of co sell partnership, the requirement for for that would be to enroll in the certified tier.

And then if you're interested in the preferred tier co sell partnership, then you would enroll into the professional tier. Okay. Great. If we've identified that we wanna be part of the preferred tier, how long does it take, and how do we make sure we are chosen for for the preferred tier? Okay. So I hear two questions there.

How long does it take, and then how, how do we know if if we're able to get enrolled, be eligible for cosol? Yeah. So how long does it take in terms of if I understand that question correctly, depending on where you are in terms of all the different requirements that we listed out, that time will vary in terms of when you are ready for, eligible for co sell evaluation. So this could roughly take, you know, anything. It could really range from one month to twelve months, and that really depends. The second part of the question is how would we know that, you know, if we do the professional tier that we are, you know, gonna get the preferred tier of co sell partnership? So we can't guarantee that.

What we can tell you though is that if you do meet all the different requirements, most likely at the least you will be, landing you will be enrolled into the co sell authorized tier. It's really the preferred tier that we are doing an additional kind of stringent evaluation. And what we're looking for in terms of the type of partner products for co selling on the preferred tier are those products that we do know, you know, that really complements the value and enhances the value of, you know, our Canvas product or other Instructure products. And, additionally, products that we know have really strong product market fit. And especially, you know, it's a market moment where this is an in demand solution.

We know there's traction. And then we have the confidence where if Instructure gets involved, then we can really kind of successfully, and generate significant sales out of that product. So those are the types of partner products that we're looking for, especially on the preferred tier. And also, important thing to note here is, we are while we don't have a specific number, we do we are limiting the number of partner products that we're co selling on the preferred tier because of the fact is is that it's just a much more involved co selling collaboration with partners. And we also wanna make sure our go to market teams are focused on kind of a select number of partner products to proactively push, to our customers.

Perfect. Okay. We have, a follow-up to the first question that was Okay. Which was, could you go down this road for LTI custom development services as we do a lot of this work for Instructure customers, or is this only intended for established products in market? And then, he followed up with that per product basis comment may have answered my question. I was curious whether or not we could go down the co sell path with a custom service, meaning it's not a product we're selling off the shelf, but rather being engaged to develop custom LTIs or Canvas using customers.

Yeah. So when we are talking about co sell, we're talking about co selling products, not services. If you are interested in, essentially, a co sell type but co selling services, we do have a separate program for that that is managed by our professional services team. But what we're talking about today is, co selling, partner products rather than services. K.

Hopefully, that answered the question. I have another question here. To make sure we provide the right documentation, could you clarify whether the service level three quarter certificate refers to a a completed HECVAT lighter full or if an external certification such as, ISO twenty seven or two seven zero zero one or SOC two would suffice. So if you have the SOC two type two or the as ISO certification, then you should be passing, our Instructure, privacy and security assessment. So it's if you tab those two, what we're saying is it's you can it we can safely assume that you will pass our, assessment.

K. Great. And then, I think we got oh, we have one more. We operate a marketplace for business applications and are interested in listing Canvas as an LMS offering. Many of our clients are newly licensed or accredited universities that are actively seeking robust learning management solution.

Given this context, would it be more appropriate for us to explore a co seller partnership with Canvas to better serve these institution? So what this sounds like is where it seems like you are interested in selling Canvas, like our LMS, to your customers. So that will be, actually from instructors perspective, that would be what we would consider a channel partner, a value added reseller. We do have a program that's available for that. But for the purposes of today, what that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about co selling, our partners' products to our customers.

But if you wanna reach out to us, we can certainly get you in touch with our channel team. Yeah. Okay. And the last person said, perfect. Thanks, for that first question.

And I think that might conclude our q and a. Okay. I don't see any other questions. Yeah. I think we're good.

Alright. Well, thank you, everyone. Excited to talk to you if you wanna dive in and learn more and explore, co selling with us. Once you get connected to our personal success managers or our senior business advisers, I'll be also be chiming in to support you and kind of answer additional questions that you might have. But excited to, partner with you all. Thank you.