Sydney: Derek, you have more than 20 years of experience working with partners. How do you plan to leverage that experience to enhance WatchGuard’s sales strategy?
Derek: There are a couple of ways we can approach it. With 20 years in the industry, strengthening the partner relationships I’ve built and drawing on past experiences to create strong, collaborative relationships is key. I plan to deepen those existing connections and seek new high-potential alliances to give us frequent engagement, understanding partner needs and aligning WatchGuard’s offerings with our growth objectives. Through this approach, we can drive co-selling opportunities. Having led numerous co-selling efforts, I’m focused on ensuring seamless collaboration between our sales teams and partners.
It’s important for our partners to understand our value and how we can help grow our mutual business. Over the years, as we’ve moved from selling products to services, it’s been crucial to ensure our incentives align with the growth of both companies.
Sydney: Karen, marketing is a crucial part of any business, especially in the channel. What new initiatives are you excited to roll out that will really strengthen WatchGuard’s relationship with channel partners?
Karen: We know that new business growth is a constant focus for our partners, but marketing can often take a backseat with so many competing priorities. To address this, we’re simplifying marketing for our partners. We’re offering a new menu of options based on our most effective strategies and these are turnkey programs designed to attract new customers and build loyalty with existing clients.
These packages include a variety of marketing tactics, but really focus on integrating sales and marketing activities. Partners can choose to implement the packages as they are or customize them to fit their needs and put their brand forward. Our team is here to support them throughout the campaign process. Our ultimate goal is to streamline execution and make it easier for partners to achieve their objectives.
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Sydney: Rich, renewals are such a key touchpoint with customers. How do you plan to keep them involved and make sure WatchGuard continues delivering real value to both customers and partners?
Rich: Like everything at WatchGuard, it all starts with the channel. First, we need to continue to innovate to ensure partners can deliver the best possible security outcomes for their customers. That means listening to them, gathering their feedback and making sure that our roadmap aligns with their objectives.
Second, we need to provide tools that give partners a clear view of how WatchGuard products are deployed—knowing expiry dates, understanding which customers have which products and helping partners identify opportunities to deliver even better security solutions for their customers.
The final piece, I believe, is ensuring best-in-class operational support. Often, this behind-the-scenes support can be overlooked, but at WatchGuard, we want our partners to be the face of the cybersecurity solutions they offer. That means providing sophisticated training, so they can effectively and quickly deploy best-in-class security products. When things sometimes go wrong, we make sure they have all the resources they need to be frontline support.
If complications arise, our partners need to know they can pick up the phone and reach a WatchGuard engineer immediately—not in hours or days—so they can deliver best-in-class service to their customers. I believe all these elements combined allow our partners to offer the best possible experience to customers, and we want to make sure they can do so profitably. Without the channel, there’s no way for WatchGuard to succeed.