Sophos ensures to clearly define the key elements of its partner program

Rajeev Gupta 
Director Channel Sales - India & SAARC - Sophos  

Driving bottom-line revenue growth for partner’s organizations is a key priority and an important parameter for Sophos to consider while measuring its success. The effectiveness of partners, in terms of creating new customer opportunities, as well as upselling or cross-selling to existing customers, is also a significant success metric.

For organizations such as Sophos, with a channel-first approach, partner programs are integral to our go-to-market strategies. Our business model revolves around our channel partners. In line with this partner-centric approach, our products and services have been designed to enable partners to effectively address customer’s security concerns and enhance profitability. 

In order to facilitate clear and transparent communication with our partners, we periodically collect feedback via anonymous partner surveys. These enable partners to share feedback on their experience of working with Sophos, rate our processes, and identify areas of improvement. Moreover, in keeping with this commitment to transparency, we ensure that key elements of the partner program – including the registration process, enablement tools, training, and growth path opportunities – are clearly defined and communicated to partners. 

Our partner program has been designed to reward commitment to Sophos. Partners can achieve profitability under three aspects of the program - 

Tiered discounts: We provide tiered discounts aligned to the respective partner tiers - Authorized Partner, Silver Partner, Gold Partner, Platinum Partner and Sub-distributors. These discounts help partners build consistent profitability. 

Margin retention opportunities: ‘Deal Registration’ and ‘Incumbency’ are the arrangements to provide margin retention to our partners. ‘Deal Registration’ enables partners to secure upsell, cross-sell and new customer opportunities, while ‘Incumbency’ helps them with renewing customers. 

Rebate program: We assign targets to certain focused partners. Upon achievement of the targets, these partners earn an additional percentage of the revenue as rebate. 

The number of partners actively participating in the rebate program, and achieving their rebate targets, is another strong metric to measure performance. Participation of our partner’s sales & technical team-members in our certification programs, and successful completion of the same, is another positive indicator. Furthermore, many partners who became part of the program as Authorized Partners or as Silver Partners, have since upgraded their status to Gold or Platinum – another powerful indicator of the success of the Partner Program. 

Of course, the ultimate criteria to judge the effectiveness of the Partner Program is customer satisfaction. Our partner’s ability to solve complex cybersecurity challenges for customers will reflect the program’s success.