Channel partners have become a strategic extension for technology businesses all over the world. Within the cybersecurity sector, channel partners have proven to be the backbone for many companies leading them to huge success. Agari is a channel-first company with a vision of being the most channel-friendly company in the cybersecurity industry.
Here at Agari, channel partners can fall in various categories, some of which include:
- Value Added Resellers (VARs): VARs typically have their own sales and technical professionals who can represent a company very well in reselling products and services. VARs get a healthy discount from the company, providing them good margins. They can provide additional services to enhance their revenues.
- Strategic Partners: These partners can be OEM or reseller partners, many of which are larger companies with their own suite of products. Because of the synergy with another vendor’s products, they can bundle or jointly resell these products with their own solutions so customers can get all their solutions from one vendor.
- Global System Integrators: These are generally large consulting companies who provide services to bring together multiple vendors’ products together to deliver a fully integrated solution for customers
- Technology Partners: Technology partners are companies who are in the cybersecurity ecosystem and help strengthen the combined solution through interoperability.
Agari works with partners in all four categories and has signed up some great partners over the last few years. In the last quarter of 2018, we launched a new structured channel partner program called Agari Partner Power Program™ for Value Added Resellers. The program includes different tier levels depending on the partner’s commitment, an online dedicated portal for channel enablement, deal registration, marketing support, and many other benefits. Since the launch of the program, we have already seen a 25% growth in the number of partners in North America and EMEA in just a few months, and we believe that our channel partners will contribute a significant portion of our pipeline this year.
We are also proud to announce GuidePoint Security as our partner of the year due to their revenue and pipeline contribution, like-minded personnel, security focus, and commitment of resources both on technical and sales side to support Agari’s solutions. Congratulations to everyone on the Guidepoint Security team!
The Secret Behind Our Success
So, why has the program been so successful, so quickly? Working with partners is a two-way street. Many companies fail because they want partners to do everything without providing them with the marketing, sales, and technical support they need to be successful. That formula will never work. By definition partnership “..is a relationship resembling a legal partnership and usually involving close cooperation between parties having specified and joint rights and responsibilities," according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary. The key words here being cooperation and joint rights and responsibilities. Agari is behind our partners 100 percent and want to work with them closely to make both companies successful. Here are just some of the key ingredients for achieving success with partners that Agari has implemented already or is in the process of implementing:
- Leads: As with all organizations, leads are important to our partners. We pass qualified leads to our partners just like they pass to us in the true spirit of partnership.
- Tiered Program: Having a tiered program allows partners to work with Agari based on their structure and capabilities and still take advantage of the program. As the partner makes more investment in terms of commitment to Agari’s solutions they reap more benefits.
- Healthy Discounts: Partners get healthy discounts based on their tier level so they can enjoy robust revenues with Agari’s solutions.
- Deal Registration: Partners can register their deals easily, which allows them bigger discounts and also avoids channel conflict.
- Marketing Support: Our partners get strong marketing support with joint marketing events, sponsorship of partner events, thought leadership and PR support, and access to all marketing assets including solution briefs, white papers, positioning and messaging, presentations, and more.
- Sales Support: The Agari sales and channel team is in constant communication with our VARs to provide full support in deals.
- Technical Support: Agari sales engineers and customer support teams are fully committed to providing support to our partners in engaging with their customers.
- Training: We offer free marketing, sales, and technical training to our partners to help them better understand and sell Agari products.
- Online Portal: We have rolled out an industry leading online portal for full channel enablement, deal registration, training, joint business plans, MDF, and joint marketing planning.
Our dedicated and structured VAR program, along with our channel-first strategy has already resulted in great recognition from industry leading Channel Reseller News (CRN). Recognition for Aari includes a place on the CRN Security 100 for 2019, and VP of Worldwide Channel Sales, Tracy Pallas was recently recognized as a CRN 2019 Channel Chief. We hope to continue to see recognition of our partner-focused efforts this year.
We appreciate all our partners’ contributions as we plan to roll out additional programs and solutions in the coming months. We look forward to working with our partners for continued joint success.