Barracuda has been recognized by CRN with a 5-Star Award in its 2024 Partner Program Guide. The 5-Star rating is awarded to the companies that have built their partner programs to go above and beyond in their commitment to nurturing strong, profitable, and successful channel partnerships.
Here at Barracuda, we have a long history of commitment to the channel. Our team has been working hard to continually improve our partner program. In December, we announced the launch of the Barracuda Partner Success Program, and earlier this month we shared additional enhancements to the program.
To get you an inside perspective on the program, we sat down with Jason Beal, Vice President of Worldwide Partner Ecosystems at Barracuda, and Alli Oneal, Senior Manager of Global Partner Programs and Partner Experience at Barracuda.
Q&A with Jason Beal and Alli Oneal
Q: Which enhancements to the program do you think are most impactful?
Jason Beal: We architected the program around customer success, and I think that’s critical. As the industry has moved toward as-a-service models and product-led growth, it’s become more important than ever for partners and vendors to work together to truly drive customer success throughout the entire customer lifecycle management. It presents a huge opportunity for channel partners to monetize the relationships with their vendors throughout their entire customer journey of land, adopt, expand, renew, and everything in between. That’s an important trend right now in the industry. The Barracuda Partner Success Program aims to help partners embrace it.
Q: How does being a Partner Success Program make it different from other partner programs?
Alli Oneal: Some other vendors in the industry now are cutting back on some of the things that we’re doubling down on, whether it’s partner margin or putting more resources into helping partners grow. We’re introducing Premier partner rebates and increasing investments with our global distributors as well. To help us grow our channel, we’re leaning in on our channel-first strategy and making meaningful investments in partners with the new program.
Jason Beal: Building on that, all the enablement we’re doing to help the partners to maximize their partner multiplier is equally as important. Our research indicates that the channel has the opportunity to create a 5.5x partner economic opportunity around every $1 of Barracuda sold. We’re really proud of what we’ve done to support our partners this way.
Q: What are the most important benefits of the program for partners?
Jason Beal: The Barracuda Partner Success Program is one of the only programs in the industry that truly recognizes all of the business that partners are doing with us across the various routes to market, whether they are doing projects and resale business, whether they’re doing managed services or co-managed services with their end users, or whether they’re helping their customers through the cloud and buying and transacting off marketplaces. Counting all partner businesses, thus giving these partners this power of choice, helps them to be agile to meet their end customers where and how their end customers want to procure and consume their technology.
Alli Oneal: Something that’s unique about our program is we’ve structured the benefits that are provided for each of the program levels into a category that relates to the customer success framework, providing resources for partners that match up to the different stages of the customer lifecycle. For example, we have a set of benefits that are related to the “land” stage to help our partners drive net new logos. We also have benefits aligned to “adoption,” whether that’s through some of our technical tools or helping partners understand how customers can best adopt technology resources. As we continue to evolve and iterate on the program, we’ll keep building on that foundation, adding more benefits to each of those categories.
Q: What are your goals for the program going forward?
Jason Beal: We’ve already brought notable enhancements to partner technical enablement. We will continue to add more as we iterate the program. In addition, we will continue to focus on partner technical enablement, including helping partners build even stronger service practices across the entire lifecycle of their customers’ journey with Barracuda. We recently brought David Hartman on to lead global technical enablement. He’s hard at work putting together some really cool tools and resources for the technical contacts at our partners to help enable them to sell across the portfolio.
Alli Oneal: In addition, continuing to improve partner experience will be a priority for us going forward. We have a great foundation with our partner portal and the resources that we provide. However, there’s so much more we can do to enable our partners and make their engagements with Barracuda, our portal, and our tools more meaningful and impactful. I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to continue evolving our partner portal and what that experience looks like overall.
Q: What element of the program do you wish more partners took advantage of?
Jason Beal: We’ve done what we believe is a first-in-the-industry partner customer success certification. We’d like more partners to take advantage of that and to work more closely with our customer success team to decrease churn, increase customer lifetime value, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Alli Oneal: We have a lot of really great things available on our partner portal. This includes access to third-party tools that provide a lot of self-service administrative capabilities. I wish more partners engaged with all the great things that we’re putting on the partner portal. For example, there is a library of videos to help onboard new partners, marketing and demand generation resources like campaign-in-a-box, and so much more.
Note: This was originally published at Journey Notes
Photo: fizkes / Shutterstock
