EXCLUSIVE: Canva invests in the channel as it aims for enterprise clients

Rob Giglio, chief customer officer explains why the graphic design giant now wants to work with partners.

Australian start-up darling Canva has launched its first-ever global channel strategy as it sets its sights on growing its enterprise customers and reaching a billion monthly active users.

For the past ten years, the company has enjoyed the growth from individual users and SMEs. But as of May 2024, the company has been wanting to make a broader impact within the enterprise sector.

One of the ways Canva will do that, is through reseller partners.

Rob Giglio, chief customer officer at Canva spoke exclusively to CRN Australia about why the time is now to leverage partners for the company’s future growth strategy.

“We want to find a way to get to more customers, and in our pursuit for more customers, we want to leverage our partners to accelerate adoption and deliver even greater value out to our customers,” he said.

“Partners will provide reach, and they'll provide engagement. They'll provide reach in ways that we just we wouldn't be able to meet on our own.”

Regardless of their status within the technology community, Giglio said they we not able to leverage partners until a year ago.

“About a year ago, we started adding functionality that was well suited for medium to bigger businesses, things like SSO and SCIM, some of the provisioning and some of the security and compliance features that are really expected from companies,” he said.

"We started a year ago selling into companies. We started early on to do that ourselves, we had good success, but the success is limited by our ability to scale.”

B2B markets like Japan and Korea are purely channel-based, and to make waves in those markets, Giglio recognised the need for a global partner system.

"As we started to grow, we realised there's no way we're going to be able to penetrate every market in the entire world, which is what we aspire to do, and get to every possible organisation,” he said.

“We feel good with 25 million paying subscribers, but that probably needs to be 250 million paying subscribers. I don't think we could get there on our own and the expertise that we get from partners is important.”

Closer to home, Giglio said Australian partners have been excited about to talk with Canva and potentially work with the company. They have been speaking to a number of resellers in Australia and New Zealand.

“Data#3 is a good example of [a partner] we had early conversations with and they're excited,” he said.

“The way they look at it, and the reason we think it makes so much sense, is there are clusters of customers that they have these great relationships with, that we would be able to fast track the sales cycle.”

Giglio acknowledged that Canva could go to media companies and build relationships with them. But they want to work with partners.

“But there's something about the commercial relationship that is going to get facilitated by resellers that already have these 20, 30, 50 year relationships with end customers. It's just going to be better,” he explained.

To help facilitate and grow their partner strategy, Canva is hiring a global reseller lead that will be Sydney-based.

“We're not announcing it yet, but our global leader is going to be coming from the Australian market,” he said.

“I'm excited about that because we're headquartered there and because this unnamed person knows so much about the APAC region in particular, about Australia and New Zealand.”

Canva’s partner program

In tandem with the launch of their partner strategy, Canva will also be releasing a partner program.

Giglio said it is a classic partner program model that isn’t “super tricky”.

“When you look at like Microsoft, for instance, the way their channel program is it's super complex. New deals over this size, get this kind of rebate and have this margin,” he said.

“We're trying to be purposefully simple. Our ingoing approach is 20 points, that's the standard margin structure for deals that are sold, they're technically co-sold, because we sell with the reseller, because we feel like there's a lot of education to provide.”

He noted that Canva won’t take the customer back if the reseller closes the deal.

"If the reseller closes the deal, that's they close it with us, that's now their customer. We're going to resell it on the renewal together, that's super motivating,” he said.

“That's going to be a great incentive for resellers to be excited about this program, because most reseller margins are getting cut like crazy, and most people are no longer paying for the renewal.”

Giglio said everybody sees the renewal as turnkey, and Canva doesn’t see it that way at all.

“We see it as there's a lot of value that the reseller is going to add in our motion, and customer acquisition would have cost about that much anyway, so why not work with the reseller,” he said.

“It's not like we're paying incrementally, like these are going to be incremental customers that are coming.”

According to Giglio, one of the benefits to working with Canva is partners will have the opportunity to sell a highly incremental product.

“It's not like when somebody sells Canva into an account, they rip something else out. That's not the way our footprint has been working,” he said.

“Most of our sales motions have been incremental to other software that was in the account and where it's not incremental, where it is like taking the place of other tools, those tools are not software that is largely sold by resellers.”

This incremental product has the opportunity to compete against legacy software that resellers didn’t sell in the first place, Giglio noted.

“By the way, they’re going to make more margin when they sell it. I'm excited for us to unlock this because having worked in the channel for as many years as I have, this is this one is lucrative.”