When you think of your organization’s relationship and with its IT vendors, what comes to mind? If all you know about them is which products you’ve signed for or how much money you’re spending with them, chances are you’re not getting the most out of your partner program.
Providing valuable IT solutions and services is only the base level of what a vendor should be doing for your organization. Vendors should not be simply ‘handing you the keys’ to their products — they should be enabling your entire team to get the most use and effectiveness out of those products and assisting you in illustrating to your clients that these services are signs your organization is giving maximum effort to meet their IT needs.
CRN’s annual Partner Program Guide offers an in-depth look at the very best partner programs offered by vendors across the channel. Recently, both Barracuda and Barracuda MSP were honored with spots on the list, each earning yet another five-star rating for the special programs and resources they offer to channel partners.
Barracuda’s award-winning partner program
Barracuda’s partner program provides resources to help channel partners with a variety of business development goals, including building specialization capabilities for vertical markets and industries that their clients operate in, cloud management, and integration service skills. They also offer hands-on, self-paced sales training to better educate partners’ employees on using their services to generate further business. This includes classroom-based technical training and labs that provide certification tests for partners.
Barracuda also invests in their partners’ service delivery skills with field training provided by Barracuda’s staff of experts, case studies that demonstrate the value of a solution, reference guides, and more. Among Barracuda’s field sales engagement efforts are access to dedicated technical staff, product specialists, and channel account managers. Incentives to encourage partners looking to scale their business further include incremental discounts for new customers and multi-product deals.
Barracuda also helps partners that want to strengthen their customer success initiatives with resources like data about customer adoption, expansion, and renewal; incentives based on partners driving business; and marketing materials to support partners’ conversations with their clients.
Along with regularly attending third-party events, Barracuda hosts its own webinars and conferences with its partners to educate them on the latest security issues and update them on Barracuda’s newest innovations. The Barracuda channel team also regularly meets with partners on an individual basis and offers marketing development funds to partners looking to enhance their marketing activities.
Support for every business model, including MSPs
In addition to the previously mentioned services that Barracuda supplies to its partners, Barracuda has a dedicated business unit geared toward supporting managed services providers, Barracuda MSP. Barracuda MSP offers purpose-built management platforms, MSP-friendly pricing models, access to a robust multi-layered security portfolio, and a wealth of channel expertise.
In addition, the business unit offers an exclusive partner community platform and partner toolkit, which contains various enablement resources for marketing to small and medium businesses, training certifications, technical tips and tricks, and more.
Partnerships enable all parties to be better, together
The best partner programs are designed to help channel partners strengthen and scale their offerings to win more business, provide education on the technology and business challenges that their clients will require their services to overcome, and better position them to help their clients achieve their goals. These principles should be kept in mind when evaluating your current channel partnerships and any future partnerships you hope to establish.
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