Working with channel partners is a core part of GoTo’s principal strategy. The company empowers businesses and their IT teams to be laser-focused on serving and supporting employees and customers to work remotely, flexibly, and securely. GoTo’s solutions are built with the SMEs in mind, and the partners who serve them, says Yvette McEnearney, Director, Channel, Asia Pacific, GoTo, in an exclusive interaction with CRN India
Some edited excerpts:
- Can you give us an overview of GoTo APAC and India channel strategy for 2023?
GoTo empowers businesses and their IT teams to be laser-focused on serving and supporting employees and customers to work remotely, flexibly, and securely. Our solutions are built with SMEs in mind – and the partners who serve them, helping to address their requirements around IT management and support and business communications. At GoTo, working through channel partners is a core part of our principal strategy. We’re leveraging our partner’s network and customer base to complement our direct sales effort across India.
Through our partner-first approach, we tap into the expertise, insight, and trends that our partners identify in their market and personalise our solutions to serve their needs. From a customer standpoint, our partner-first approach allows our customers to benefit from product expertise and local support provided by our skilled partners. We have dedicated partner managers, pre-sales and operations who work closely with our partner organisations to address their most pressing challenges, empowering them to grow their business with our solution offerings, and securely serve their SME customers.
So, as you can appreciate, the Asia Pacific as a whole, is quite a big region and for us to cover that and expand what we want to do in the market, is really, the way for us to be able to grow through channels, we can’t have people everywhere. With the Indian market emerging as one of the largest destinations for SaaS-based technology, hybrid work model, and customer support companies, we aim to penetrate the industry in India through our strong channel presence.
That’s the whole idea of the multiplier effect of having partners engaged to get our access to a much broader market space.
We are uniquely positioned to help SMEs and enterprises – through our partner network – to support and secure what’s most essential – their customers and employees in order to protect their company’s revenue. That will be more important than ever in the months and years ahead as many organisations face economic headwinds. GoTo is already working with many channel partners and GSIs to co-create resilient IT support tools for businesses of all sizes. With further expansion into the partner ecosystem, we are looking to collaborate with more partners to broaden the accessibility of our solutions to customers and at the same time ensure a regional approach that works for partners in different geographies.
- What are GoTo’s focus verticals in 2022-23 and the technology trends to watch out for?
We focus predominantly on SMEs. Our solutions are built with SMEs in mind – and the partners who serve them, helping to address their requirements around IT management and support. I am referring to the 1000 employees, and below, it’s quite a huge area of the market, especially in APAC, it’s pretty much the market, it’s probably 85 percent of the whole region.
Depending on the size of the business and the industry, leaders can either strategically look for more ways to cut operating costs or think of ways to grow and scale the company, while remaining cost-efficient. The economic fluctuations eventually affect how a business operates and how employees manage to do their tasks as a team. This is where IT support tools act as the backbone of operations, customising features, streamlining communication flow, and providing IT support.
Our solutions are particularly relevant to help BFSI, ITES, BPO/OIT, Higher Education and Healthcare focused businesses to better support and connect their workforce and customers securely. It’s about making it easy for those industries.
Talking about SMEs, they want things to be simple. They want to know that the products are using very security-focused as well. And we want to make it flexible for them. By consolidating tech stacks within one unified remote work platform, businesses can easily streamline and manage their workforce and tools, to save on budget and resources that are in short supply in this economic environment
Speaking about the major technological trends that have sustained business operations throughout the rough years and are believed to build business resilience in coming months, some of them are:
- Cloudification – Cloud adoption is happening as both a technology and a business transformation strategy. This trend is expected to continue, with a strong shift towards digitalisation across all layers of the technology stack – Software, Applications, Platforms, Infrastructure, and Services.
- Network security – Zero Trust security refers to maximum security across cloud and network parameters. We support SMEs with 99.99 percent up-time, a zero-trust approach to security, and products that partners can deploy quickly and easily.
- Video conferencing – This is key to driving growth in video collaboration solutions with an aim to make faster decisions and enable employees and customers to communicate and connect more efficiently.
- What are some of the new innovation/product developments at GoTo that cater to the pressing challenges of the channel partner ecosystem in the APAC region?
As we are aware, a lot of our tools are very intuitive. GoTo empowers businesses and their employees to get work done anywhere, at any time. Our solutions equip SMEs with enterprise-grade software at an affordable rate, levelling the playing field with larger organisations in terms of their IT Management Solutions capabilities. We provide the most robust portfolio of tools for flexible working, ensuring businesses continue without disruption while employees’ devices stay up and running and continue to connect with one another and the business’ customers, and uniquely placed to offer all-in-one IT management and support software at the same time.
GoTo’s platform works well even in poor network conditions, significantly improving the meeting experience for those living in areas with legacy infrastructure and average broadband bandwidth and the end-users Rank GoTo #1 for Support (Information source: average customer support rating across top 6 user review websites – Gartner Peer Insights, G2, TrustRadius, GetApp, Capterra, Software Advice).
Partners understand the pulse of the customers and therefore, working through channel partners is a core part of our expansion strategy. We recently launched new features in our product GoTo Resolve with IT support offerings designed specifically for our Managed Service Providers (MSPs). If we think about like, MSPs, our remote access tools are really useful for those types of partners, we find partners in that space as well. If they’re using our tools, with features like conversational ticketing, it’s a lot easier for them to talk to their customers about the ease of raising support tickets, and how it helps them run their own business.
The Endpoint Protection Software allows MSPs to provide an additional layer of security and added value to their clients. We very much encourage our partners to use the technology, and then it makes it much easier for them to sell it. Whether it’s remote access tools, or whether it’s unified communications, they basically run through a programme to allow them to use the products themselves as well.
- Can you please share some business insights that will become a key differentiator in the channel ecosystem?
We’re channel first and we have a mentality within the company, especially across APAC, that channel is very important to our success metrics. As you know from a growth strategy, we can’t be in every single country, right? It would not be feasible for us to put people everywhere. Partners are key to our growth and success, and we are 100 percent committed to empowering them. We try to basically make sure we enable them correctly. We ensure that they can run at whatever opportunities they find and obviously, we also go out and do our own lead generation and bring opportunities back to the channel.
Our GoTo Partner Network programme includes a formalised tiering model with associated benefits relative to performance. This creates additional revenue opportunities for providing remote support, endpoint management, and additional GoTo collaboration products.
Partners are given access to dedicated pre-sales resources to successfully configure and quote solutions along with guidance throughout the customer lifecycle. Pre-sales help them map out what the customer really needs, and we do a lot of training off the back of that as well. Then we have the sales team that backs that up as well. They’ve got an ecosystem of people to call on to help them with those opportunities. We provide our partners with on-demand sales, enablement, marketing, training, and support resources and everything they need to successfully position, refer, and sell GoTo products.
- How do you upskill your partners to help them tap more into the market opportunities?
The majority of our partners are actually using our tools, which is a huge enablement for them in terms of how they position in the market because they should understand the benefits their own company gets from using it. Additionally, we have in conjunction with the channel team, and the pre-sales team, run enablement sessions, and we do those regularly.
Typically, when we onboard a partner, obviously, the channel manager brings them in, and they talk to them about, what it looks like. The sales enablement with them is done straight up, we then bring pre-sales into the picture and work with them across how the scenario looks from a technical perspective. What do they need to be aware of? Where do they position the products? Where do they, and what market should they focus on, we often will sit down and look through with them. If they’ve got an existing customer base, where would be the low-hanging fruit for them in terms of, some of these customers being on the same level or working base, you could go into these customers, and this would be how you would position it.
We also do ongoing enablement around by using information that we have internally that they can access through our channel ecosystem. We conduct regular webinars too. It basically is a chance for us to give them an update on what’s happening from a product perspective, and what’s happening around campaigns that we may be doing with the channel, and gives them the opportunity and road mapping and then it gives them an opportunity to ask us questions around what they would like.
Thank you for sharing such an informative blog