Why one vendor is rewarding resellers for failed deals

Security vendor moves resellers up partner programme levels even for deals which never close

Malwarebytes has made claims on the growth of its UK business, accrediting the novel make-up of its partner programme.

The US security vendor opts to reward deal registration quantity rather than pure sales volume to surge resellers up the various levels of its partner programme.

"The UK is one of our brighter spots in the whole company at the moment in terms of the growth we are achieving there," Anthony O'Mara, vice president EMEA at Malwarebytes told CRN.

"A big part of that is down to the partners we are engaged with and the innovation we have brought to our channel programme. WannaCry has driven an uptake in our sales too."

The partner progamme innovation involves a departure from the traditional sales volume targets of many vendors, claimed O'Mara.

"When we set up our channel programme initially, we concentrated on using margin to get attention. We now have a programme which is unlike many other vendors as we are rewarding partners at the front end of the sales process.

"Most vendors have some version of a precious metal channel programme - platinum, gold, and silver. Most of these vendors reward hitting a revenue target, which will enable the reseller to hit a certain level and gain additional discounts and margin.

"We decided we wanted to get in front of customers too. So rather than going to resellers and saying 'give us $1m and we'll give you more margin' we are asking them to register the deals they are working on. The more deals they register, the better margin they receive. That is regardless of how many of these deals they close."

O'Mara said resellers that get in excess of seven deal registrations qualify it to be a platinum partner.

"We are hopeful that they will close between 30 to 40 per cent of those deal registrations. This approach means that we work collaboratively with the resellers by using our technical teams to help them close those deals.

"This has resulted in an increasing number of resellers registering with us and we have also developed a short lead time between when resellers register and when they close their first deal," added O'Mara.