Et tu, Klaviyo? And The Tale Of Who Moved Your Cheese

Based on yesterday's reaction you would have thought Klaviyo canceled their agency partner program. They did not.

It started out with the Future Commerce (which I love)"emergency podcast" and then just continued on throughout the day with a huge number of overreactions.

Let's start with a few simple truths:

* Every sufficiently large software company which is going up-market needs Professional Services. Fact.

* Klaviyo is following Shopify's recent playbook having done the same thing in the past year and a half. Fact.

* Klaviyo is signaling that for some large customers, their product is not yet ready. Fact.

* Klaviyo is now tracking # of customers which pay it over $50k. In 3 years, they will begin tracking # of customers that pay it over $100k. And then $250k. In 5 years, you will see it track $1M customers.

This is where Klaviyo is headed. The part that the product is not ready is just true. How could it be? You'd like to target the mid-market and upper mid-market and Enterprise, and you have no Professional Services offering?

As they said in Succession, large clients would conclude: "These are not serious people". No. Klaviyo needs Professional Services to get fine-grained information of the huge gaps that they know must exist in their platform.

So they can improve.

So let's unpack the hubbub about the moves. Here's what did not happen:

* Klaviyo abandoning its partners.

* Klaviyo targeting SMBs with this.

* Klaviyo made a mistake in overcharging for its services

* Professional services does not equate to an agency.

The "what if" Klaviyo went after our business is a waste of energy. Just stop. And if you are that concerned, I can give only one piece of advice: Take a deep breath, diversify your revenue, and get on with your life.

Read the business book: "Who Moved My Cheese?".

An agency is a third-party collects a retainer over a period of time to manage and improve a client's business. I think many don't even know what Professional Services is about.

Professional services, instead, has 4 purposes:

* Make feature improvements and fixes to the product in real time for customers.

* Build and host custom client software in the company's datacenter, when architecture requires it be built this way.

* Provide high-level strategic and architectural advice based on knowledge only employees have about the product's implementation, particularly in high-volume or complex use cases.

* In many other software businesses, agencies interact regularly with a platform's Professional Services because they are the "power users" of the product.

All told, let's get back to winning on behalf of clients and stop worrying about our true partners moving our cheese. They will, of course, keep moving that cheese a little bit. But you can always adjust.