Adrienne Cohen and Isabelle Li lead cloud-partner marketing efforts for Microsoft and Google
We’re so proud that two Elasticians have been named to the 2022 CRN Women of the Channel list. Adrienne Cohen and Isabelle Li are both Director of Partner Marketing at Elastic, leading efforts with Microsoft and Google, respectively.
We spoke with Adrienne and Isabelle to get their insights on why building productive channel relationships with cloud partners is so important for our customers.
Making things as easy as possible for the customer
How does Elastic’s focus on cloud partners benefit customers? Do you have some examples that are particularly meaningful to you?
Adrienne: Giving customers quick and easy access to Elastic Cloud on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace has been so cool and rewarding. Our incredible engineering teams worked with Azure to build native integration into the Azure portal so customers can get started with single sign-on and just a few clicks.
The engagement and adoption is awesome to be a part of — anything that makes our customers’ lives easier is a win for all of us.
The biggest priority is elevating the customer value for and through each and every partnership. It’s not on the customer to know how we can do more, it’s on us. The opportunities to bring the best tools together to better serve them are astronomical.
Isabelle: Our customers are able to get the best of both worlds. The investment that Elastic has made in our partnership with Google definitely makes a difference in the customer experience.
Clients tell us that our tight integration with Google Cloud’s marketplace and solutions makes procurement and data ingestion so much easier. Customers are also able to get seamless support from both sides to ensure that any questions are addressed quickly.
Moreover, we’ve worked particularly hard to resolve any roadblocks so we can provide as native of a service as possible.
Adrienne: Being where our customers are and showing up how they want us to in the wildly evolving digital landscape requires flexibility. We have to be creative, we have to test and measure, and we have to be willing to fail fast and adjust quickly.
Isabelle: We always have to think of new ways to deliver information to our customers and adapt as-needed based on the latest and best practices. I’ve actually “borrowed” several great ideas from Adrienne in the past that were quite successful!
Prioritizing channel partnerships means prioritizing relationships
How do you approach our partnerships in a way that builds lasting trust and understanding? And how does that impact business priorities here at Elastic?
Isabelle: Building and fostering relationships is instrumental to being successful in a channel function — it really should be a KPI! The strong ties that you build with your partners not only help you in your function, but also affect the reputation of your organization, as well.
Adrienne: I agree. Partnerships are so multi-faceted and multi-functional that they truly revolve around relationships. Our team at Elastic is focused on scale and growth, but we also have fun. That translates into our relationships with our partners, too. It’s hard work but my personal goal is to keep people laughing along the way.
Isabelle: One of Elastic’s core values — what we refer to as our source code — is “As YOU, Are.” As Adrienne mentions, that extends to how we work with our partners. Most of my counterparts know what my children dress as for Halloween!
Adrienne: That said, Elastic’s channel business is integral to one of Elastic’s highest priorities — becoming cloud-first. In partner marketing, we eat, sleep, and breathe cloud. We’ve been cloud-first since day one and we are working every single day to make it reality.
Isabelle: The channel team at Google Cloud knows that Elastic is easy to work with, will always say “yes,” and more importantly, we’ll execute and deliver. This reputation goes a long way when it comes to collaborating to solve our customers’ challenges.
Celebrating a community of peers
What does being named to the 2022 CRN Women of the Channel list mean to each of you, both personally and professionally?
Adrienne: It’s a great list of peers so it’s lovely to be included. Last year’s winners included Gavriella Schuster, formerly of Microsoft. Truly great company to be in.
This is an opportunity to “high five” the many women pushing the channel to greater heights. It’s a small community where a lot of us know each other and have worked together, so any opportunity we have to lift each other up is worth celebrating.
Isabelle: I am very proud and humbled to share this honor with women who represent some of the best and brightest in thought-leadership in the channel.
It’s an opportunity to connect with peers about channel trends and best practices, and to be able to carry that knowledge back into my day-to-day function.
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