ESET's new channel boss on how internal restructure will affect partners

David Mole also says the vendor's partner programme will be overhauled in January

ESET's internal channel organisation had a "flat structure" that needed to be changed in order to accommodate its diverse partner base, according to UK channel sales director David Mole.

The endpoint security vendor has undergone an internal restructuring of its UK channel team to support its 3,000 partners in the UK.

Mole will be 12 months in the role next month, joining the cybersecurity vendor from his role as head of retail sales for UK&I at Kaspersky.

With this his first channel-centric role, he spent the first six months learning about the intricacies of partner relationships in order to facilitate the restructuring.

"I needed to change some of the ways of working, the structure and some of the behaviours internally to ensure that we were able to offer the same, or better, level of service externally," he explained to CRN.

"We've taken on more people, we've moved more resource into the channel marketing and we've got significantly more budget for 2020 and beyond.

"As a business, we've always been 100 per cent channel focused, but we've perhaps not been structured in a way that we can maximise the opportunities.

"What we didn't do particularly well was look at our partner base and differentiate how we approach them.

"Given the breadth of resellers that we have in scale and delivery, the opportunity now is to work a lot more closely with the ones that have the ability and willingness to work closer with us."

Mole added that these changes will be reviewed quarterly based on feedback from partners and account managers, and emphasised that the changes were made in order to encourage a deeper relationship with the channel.

He added that facilitating deeper relationships with partners and training them to become trusted advisors to customers will be a priority for his next year as channel sales director.

"We want to more easily meet the needs of our partners, but I think we need to manage their expectations and also ensure that we are structured accordingly internally so we can do a great job of working with the partners that have the ability and willingness to work with us," he said.

"We have a range of relationships - some are transactional but could be a lot more collaborative.

"The end user, ultimately, trusts what the reseller says and our job is to enable the reseller to do the best job they can.

"If we don't do a sufficiently good job with our resellers, then they can't do a good job selling to our end users - which was partly behind my restructure."

ESET will also be implementing changes to its partner programme from the first quarter of next year, according to Mole, who was tight-lipped on any further details about the planned move.

"The existing partner programme is fairly basic at the minute and I think this one will step change how we operate," he stated.

"I can't really talk too much about it yet because it's still being refined, but we are strongly planning to launch it in Q1 next year."