Smartsheet director of partnerships on the key role partners play in growing the business

Franco Flore at Smartsheet breaks down opportunities, AI and the plans he has at the company.

In the past five years, Smartsheet’s customers have grown 250 percent in the APJ region and Franco Flore, director of partnerships and alliances APJ gives all credit to the channel ecosystem.

“As you can imagine, this region is very much centred around partners, and the success that we have is all on the back of that. We've seen, year on year, a 30 percent growth through our partner ecosystem,” he exclusively told CRN Australia.

“My goal, my vision, is to triple the growth profit contribution, growth over the next three years.”

To triple that growth, Flore said he the company will be more focused and intentional about how they go to market.

“If you look at a lot of the partners that we work with today, they typically are the smaller size partners and boutique partners, which are really great partners for us,” he said.

“But in order for us to grow even further and scale from an ANZ perspective, we've got to now start looking at the larger partners.”

When he speaks about larger partners, Flore wants to recruit several GSI’s and RSI’s.

"The reason why we want to do that is as an organisation, we're starting to pivot and grow our business in the enterprise sector,” he explained.

“Typically, when you looking at enterprises, your deal size is a lot larger, longer sales cycle, and you're going to you need to rely on partners to be able to drive the cycles within those accounts.”

Flore said the GSIs and the RSIs are typically intentional those accounts and they're seen as trusted advisors.

“Customers reach out to them to define the strategy that they take,” he said.

“We are pivoting towards looking at the larger partners, and the partners we have today are still providing a huge amount of value, so we're going to continue with those.”

Smartsheet has five active partners in ANZ, including Atturra and Infospark, and Flore said he wants another two or three added in this region.

In his career managing partners, Flore said he has always been intentional with not having a wide net of partners.

“It's more about making sure that the ecosystem is focused small and we go deep with those partners,” he noted.

Smartsheet’s strategy for the region is rapid scaling and Flore said partners will continue to be central to the future of APJ.

“Within the Asia region, we are going very exclusively with strategic partners to address our partner only strategy,” he said.

From a partner program perspective, Smartsheet is introducing new features within the program.

“Further bolstering [the program] and what we're looking at doing is also strengthening the foundation support by providing additional tooling to our partners and training,” Flore said.

“From our standpoint, empowering the internal teams to work with partners in a collaborative way. Driving mutual growth to drive the right satisfaction level with our customers.”

Regional data centre

In May, Smartsheet launched its regional data centre in Australia, which Flore believes in a game changer for their partners.

As the company is expanding into the enterprise space, it has its sights set on healthcare, retail and mining. Flore said this data centre gives the company an opportunity to get into these markets.

“This now opens up opportunities into organisations where regulatory compliance is a must, or having data in region or locally is a must as well. So think government agencies like federal or state or financial services,” he said.

“That is another feather in the cap for partners to go after now and tackle those markets. But from our standpoint, it's now an opportunity for us to look at recruiting partners within that specific vertical and bring them on the journey.”

Taking advantage of AI

Smartsheet is integrating AI across all of its enterprise experience, from creation configuration to analysis and workflow execution, according to Flore. The company has called its AI integration ‘working with flow’.

Looking at the way they use AI, Flore said it is about doing things “easier, faster and cheaper”.

“We're focused on building AI that will lower our customers cost to inquiry, making it easier for them to ask questions, discover new ways to use the platform and make informed recommendations around technology,” he said.

“What we're trying to do is dramatically drive the cost of work down. So that's where we are going with GenAI.”