Maria Armstrong nabs new senior community manager role at Huntress

GTIA ANZ Executive Chair steps into a brand new role for the APAC region for Huntress.

Maria Armstrong has stepped into a brand new role at Huntress as the senior community manager for the APAC region.

In this role, Armstrong told CRN Australia exclusively that it is all about getting into the community and speaking with Huntress’ partners.

“Listening to what they're saying, and not saying. Taking that pulse of the partners, so that we can use that to help build our sales strategy and make a difference for them,” she said.

“It's not just about sales for us, it's a lot of reading between the lines, understanding what's going on in our industry, so that we can deliver the best service for them and we can have the right approach to how what our partners need. That's really important.”

For Armstrong, a clear metric for her is deeper relationships, which she noted can be tricky.

“We can measure it through the CRM, obviously. Who we're speaking with regularly, but it's how are we speaking to more people, supporting more people within our partner base,” she said.

“Are we providing what they need? Do they have the right training? Do they have the right resources? So, they feel that they can use Huntress within their business and go to market to their clients easily.”

With only being in the role for a few weeks, Armstrong has already had some enlightening conversations with her partners at Huntress.

She said one of the trends she’s already recognised is the information overload being thrown at partners around AI.

“That's another challenge that they have to understand, so how can we make their engagement with us simpler, stress-free, and but from their perspective, what are their challenges? Is that information overwhelming?” She noted.

Armstrong also highlighted the need of MSPs to have less relationships with vendors.

“I spoke to one yesterday who said ideally, if they could limit the amount of vendors they're talking to, they can build deeper, closer relationships with just a handful and have a better experience than speaking to a dozen or more vendors regularly.”

Armstrong has a message for Huntress’ partners, “I look forward to meeting all of them, and listening.

“I see myself as on a listening tour at the moment, just to absorb as much information as I can from our partners, so that I can bring them what they need.”

In her very limited spare time, Armstrong is also the GTIA ANZ executive chair, she was elected earlier this year to lead the local division. Prior to Huntress, Armstrong was the manager of Pax8 Academy.