Freshworks wants to provide more predictability for its partners

Laura Padilla VP global channel and emerging market sales explains how their new partner program has changed.

Cloud-based CRM platform Freshworks relaunched their partner program nearly two months ago and are now hoping that their partners are building a more predicable run rate with the vendor.

At the launch of its new program, Freshworks promised it will make it easier than ever for resellers and service delivery providers to adopt its tools.

Laura Padilla VP, global channel and emerging market sales at Freshworks spoke to CRN Australia about the new changes and what they hope to achieve with the fresh program.

When Padilla began working at Freshworks, she noticed that the old partner program wasn’t rewarding their partners properly.

“It was very tactical, transactional program,” she said.

“When I came in, the biggest thing for me that was noticeable was that we didn't really marry what the company needed from a corporate strategy perspective and what the partner program was doing.”

As the company is eyeing being a billion dollar company, Padilla said to do that they need partners.

“The only way we're going to do that is with partners who are going to invest in us in regional areas that we physically are not in,” she said.

“What was happening the program before didn't really reward that or encourage that.”

One of the biggest pieces of negative feedback Freshworks got about the previous program was around its commission structure.

Padilla explained partners highlighted how they couldn’t build a predictable business with their old program. Now, she said, it is much more predicable.

“That's a big change as well that hopefully will also allow partners to invest more with us long term, with more confidence,” she added.

She said in the first 12 months she would like to get over 40 percent contribution from partners or as close to 45 percent as possible.

“I'd like to see partners building a more predictable run rate with us,” she said.

Padilla explained what a successful partner would look like to them at Freshworks.

“A partner who invests in us from training their teams on an ongoing basis, is also going to build, like a go to market arm, meaning they're doing co-marketing with us,” she said

“From a results perspective, someone who predictably says they're building a book of business at every quarter they're doing a certain amount of revenue and growing that with us long term.”

Freshworks look at partners as being the experts in their local partners.

“Whether it's partner in Germany, France or Brazil, they know the local markets. We're really leaning on them to be able to build that practice localised,” she said.

“Having a partner that's going to build a marketing and sales arm and train their people so that they can deliver services locally, to me, that's success.”

Freshworks is also building a partner scorecard.

“As we think about that scorecard being filled out by partners, we're going to look at different regions and say, ‘how many partners do we have that are able to be stand alone, doing these things without much of our help after we train and invest in them?’

"We have some partners who do that already, but we'd like to grow that number.”