In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, host Michael Falato interviews James Stacey, a Marketing Manager at Red Hat based near London. James shares his six‑year journey at Red Hat, beginning shortly after IBM’s 2019 acquisition, and explains how his role evolved from turning IBM customers into Red Hat customers to serving as Chief of Staff for the VP of Ecosystem Marketing. He outlines Red Hat’s open‑source business model, emphasizing how the company transforms open‑source software into commercial offerings across the stack, from RHEL to application services. The conversation delves into ecosystem marketing: building internal alignment, establishing metrics and reporting, and developing strategic partner programs. James highlights a successful hyperscaler partnership initiative (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) that educated procurement leaders on leveraging existing spend for discounts, resulting in faster deal cycles and larger deals. He also discusses repeatable, scalable partner activation tactics such as joint LinkedIn events, roundtables, and co‑hosted podcasts, stressing the importance of “give before you sell.” The episode wraps with practical contact information, encouraging listeners to connect with James via his LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/TheJamesStacey).
Chapters
Hello everybody, Michael Falato here again from GTM Full Throttle. Um, this is the Full Throttle Leaders Podcast. So we have James Stacy from Red Hat, who is the marketing manager over there, and you're based in London, right? Or, or where are you in the UK? I'm based in London.
Yeah, I'm about an hour west of London.
Okay, so have you lived there your whole life?
Yes, I have.
So tell me a little bit about, um, Red Hat. How long have you been there? For like 6 years or something, right?
Yeah, just celebrated my 6-year anniversary, and before that, um, I was sort of marketing agencies and in-house in sales and marketing roles for, for the last 15 years.
So what attracted you to work at Red Hat, and what do you exactly do for them?
Yeah, so I hadn't ever worked at a large enterprise before. I'd supported them on the agency side, and I like the strategic nature of large organizations, big decisions, and high impact when you make the right decisions. So I joined just after the IBM acquisition, and the role was to to turn IBM customers into Red Hat customers because they had such a large footprint and much bigger than Red Hat's, and then had a few roles and now support our VP of Ecosystem Marketing as a Chief of Staff, so understanding management systems, operational challenges, strategic challenges, how to build the right relationships internally with the right stakeholders because a lot of that is important. And then on the more sort of operational side, you know, what does success look like? How do we report? How do we make operational changes when we need to? And yeah, every day is different, which is nice.
And how long ago did IBM purchase Red Hat, you said?
So they purchased Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion, and I think they've recouped that in about 4 years. So it was a good acquisition for them.
Out of curiosity, where did the Red Hat name come from? Do you know?
So yeah, so the guy that founded the business, he— there's a couple of different stories I've heard. One of them was that he had an uncle who lost a red hat. I don't think it was a fedora like our one is. And yeah, and on every invoice he sent out, he put, have you seen this hat? Um, and then I think, um, I think it was just like marketing. This, this guy Bob always wore his red hat and it just became sort of the emblem of the company. And, and then when he went to— needed a new name, uh, that's, that's the one he chose.
How big was Red Hat when they sold to IBM, like size, I mean employee-wise, you know?
Uh, I don't know. I think, I think there's around 30,000 employees now. So, and a lot have actually transitioned into IBM. So I'm not sure if that's an accurate figure. So it's probably doubled in size, I would say, in the last 6 years.
If you had to explain what Red Hat is to somebody that doesn't know what Red Hat is, but they've heard the name, how would you explain Red Hat?
Yeah, I mean, that's a challenge I have because all my family are farmers and they are the least technical people you can imagine. So I've had to struggle with that before. The way I like to, you know, just showcase the value that Red Hat drives is that Red Hat really, because of the nature of open source and like collaborators and contributors in different communities, Red Hat has really evolved a lot of IT and technology um, software from the, the old, you know, archetype closed box sort of proprietary software into taking the best of breed that's built on open source where there isn't any money, um, changing hands and, and, and created a new business, uh, using the, the software and everything that— or the services and everything that sits outside of that. open source software. So, you know, the operational side of RHEL, the operating system, all the way through to managing applications and so on through our other technology stack. But I really like to sell the open source story that sits among it because I think that's something that connects to people.
In your role at Red Hat, can you explain that to just a general person out there?
Yeah, so it happened really organically. We had a new leader that was coming in. I said to her, you know, I can show you the ropes. I can, like, partner marketing is valuable and everyone understands the value of partners, but they don't really understand why partners are important. And I think that the way that we win going to market with partners is to win internally by getting more and more teams both inside of marketing and outside of marketing bought into the value of marketing with partners. And so, you know, I manage calls, I get, we started with a big sort of PR roadshow with my manager Kate going to different organizations and eulogizing on the value of partner marketing. We've built out more reporting and we understand the metrics that drive success with partners because that wasn't an area and it's very hard to tell a story without metrics, as you know. And now I manage, I manage the calls, both internal and calls with, with outside teams. I work on alignment with marketing and with sales, so planning, budgeting, financing, making sure that what we're doing is aligned to both our leaders in marketing and our leaders in sales, in ecosystem success. And then outside of reporting, I manage the different leadership team calls focused on strategy. You know, what does today look like, but what does— where would we like to be 2, 3 years from now? What are the steps that we need to take to get there? Are the tools right? Is the reporting structure right? Is the organizational structures correct? So yeah, it's got a huge amount of variety, and I don't think I could even write a job description for it if I tried. But that's what keeps me Coming back for more.
What is the most effective or strategic or even repeatable and scalable approach that you like so far that you've done for the partner side in the last 6 months that either it worked really well, you're like, here's some ideas for you, audience, or here's something I did and it went boom, it did not work well, so don't do it.
Um, that's a good question. So a lot of my work is laying the foundations for other teams to be successful, whether that's the tools, the reporting. Um, so we've made a lot of changes that, that have had, um, like a, a big impact. Um, metrics, um, has been one. I think the thing that jumps to my mind is The way people buy is changing so much, and we've done a lot of work around our buyer groups and our personas. And where part— one of our— some of our most strategic partners, and will be for a lot of your audience, is the hyperscalers. So your AWS, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft, Google Cloud. And what we found was that our customers and our prospects weren't necessarily aware of the discounts and the value that they could drive by buying what they're already buying from Red Hat, but through a different sort of procurement cycle. And so we spent a lot of time targeting procurement leaders at both our customers and prospects on the value of drawing down based on their committed spend with the hyperscalers. And we, from that work, And it started with insights, then we built out the campaign, then we built out the enablement and educated both inside of Red Hat and our partners. And we've seen deal cycles get faster, we've seen deals grow, we don't have the blockers that we necessarily had before. And, you know, our IT, who is our champion, our IT persona, who is our champion within within our customers has found it a lot easier to get things through as well and make their case. So yeah, that's the one that jumps to the forefront of my mind when you ask that question.
Yeah, I kind of emphasize that in my partner approach for clients too. It's like find someone that is already trusted, that has the right contacts, and do something together that amplifies your business and their business, and they both win. And a lot of people just kind of throw MDF funds or they just do events and they don't like— you got to— there's things to do on LinkedIn where you take someone's LinkedIn connections and your LinkedIn connections and blend them together and do a joint event. And that's what really kind of drives— and then do it before the Red Hat event or before a Google Cloud event and say, we're having a get-together. Drive those like-minded people together so they can develop a relationship. So That's kind of what I hear you saying. Um, who should reach out to you? Because we're gonna close this out. So who should reach out to you on, on from this broadcast, um, through your email or phone number? And who, what, what type of people do you want to— what people, people do you want them to reach out to you? What type, like companies or titles or personas?
Yeah, no, thank you. And like, obviously it's, it's great to speak with you, and, and like really interested to know How, how much is like partners' feet in your day-to-day conversations? Has that grown in the last few years? Do you see the movement we see?
Um, I see movement either going to, hey, let's trim down our 3,000 partners to 300, which is fine, right? But the whole idea is that a lot of people have too many partners, but they're not activating them. If you don't activate them, which is where I help, Whether they're real partners now or partners later, or you're trying to get them to be partners, you gotta say, what's in it for me every single day? And if you do just throw money at them and go, go, go buy advertising, that doesn't work. So I, I always say give before you sell, right? So my whole thing is what, uh, do things like podcasts, roundtables, masterminds, events. Before events, ask people their opinion. Hey, are you going to this event? I think I'm going to be going. We'd love to talk with you. Or James and I are doing a roundtable together about partner marketing, what's working, what's not. It's just be kind of a place where you're not pushing a white paper, but you're pushing conversations. So I think that's what's been working. I get 15 to 20 meetings of sales qualified meetings by doing that. Hey, James and I are doing something together. He's putting his arm around me. I'm putting his arm around him. I have 30,000 connections. He has 20,000 connections. Boom. Now we're doing something without asking someone to go, hey, can you go to your contacts and introduce me? That's too much work. Keep it simple. Make it repeatable and scalable. That's how you grow your partner marketing or your B2B marketing.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, it is. Yeah. And it speaks to what we're trying to do internally as well.
Yeah. So yeah, definitely, definitely would love to work with you guys at one point. I love Red Hat. I mean, it's I've been on this earth for 55 years. So I've heard Red Hat for a long time. I just never really understood what they did. Because I wasn't in that space as much. I was more in the HR tech and sports marketing. But now I, I work with almost anybody because I do B2B. Yeah, it's all the go-to-market strategies. And there's really some good tech out there now where you can set up like basically bots to do a lot of your daily things, right? And remind you what you need to do. So I started using that stuff and automatic postings on LinkedIn and email and stuff. So it's really, it's really working well when you can do the busy work and make it repeatable and scalable. So, but yeah, so what's, what's the best way to reach you?
Uh, so I mean, I don't know, I'm not posting on there a lot, but I do, um, I do go on LinkedIn. So, um, I, I can share my details, um, and, uh, go from there.
It's, yeah, linkedin.com/in/TheJamesStacey. That's the username for yours, right?
Yeah, no, top tip. I got told that if, um, if your name is already being used on LinkedIn, if you type the in before your name— and it sounds a bit egotistical, but, um, that, that helps on the, on the search results and makes you come up first. So yeah, I— whoever said that to me, it's, um, it's a tip that I, uh, I Just, yeah, utilized.
Yeah, I love it, love it. Well, thanks for your time today, and, uh, we'll hopefully connect soon again.
