CrowdStike looks to accelerate channel sales

Security player CrowdStrike used its Fal.Con event as the backdrop to unveil its Accelerate programme and increase sales and training support.

The focus of the programme is to educate partners with its CrowdClass materials and to help drive demand generation and accelerate sales closure with more deal registration and campaign assistance.

The firm has also launched its CrowdCard, a cashback reward programme on debit card sales that will encourage and reward partners for economic activity.

Daniel Bernard, chief business office at CrowdStrike, said the firm had been building channel momentum, recently increasing support for service providers, and was adding more depth to the pitch with its alliances with the likes of AWS, Pax 8 and Dell.

“The programme centres on more, faster and easier. That’s really the core tenants of the accelerate programme. What is ‘more’? We have more products to sell, more solutions and more business outcomes to deliver to customers than ever before,” he said.

“Everything we’re doing is geared on helping partners to build practices around CrowdStrike, whether it’s a cloud security practice, an EDR practice, an identity protection practice, a next-gen sim practice, and more,” he added.

“The programme is centred around providing the right kind of education and enablement...around how we get partners to understand more, operationalise more,” he said.

Bernard added that its platform approach was also resonating in the market, appealing to cost-conscious customers: “What we’re hearing and seeing from the market is customers are looking for consolidation. They’re looking to get more out of their spend, lower total cost of ownership, and the market dynamics of today really play into CrowdStrike’s hand.”

“We’re seeing a separation between platform technologies and product technologies or point products, and a coalescence around platforms versus point products,” he added.

Bernard said the channel already drove a significant amount of its cloud security business, with the expectation it would drive more revenues with greater levels of support from the vendor.

Channel partner programmes often have a dual purpose of rewarding a loyal channel as well as attracting some fresh blood, and that is the case here.

Bernard said that it would be prepared to talk to fresh partners that were enticed in by the firm’s rewards and support: “We’re always attracting and recruiting new partners....However, we put a lot of resources in the top tiers. It’s for everyone, but the maximum benefits in the programme, the most lucrative thresholds, are really for our strategic and focused partners.”

The conference was also an opportunity for the vendor to talk about its marketplace and encourage more independent software vendors (ISVs) to get their products listed on the service.

Bernard said that it had taken steps to make integrating marketplace services with CrowdStrike technologies easier for customers, and that had made it “stickier” and more attractive for ISVs.

“We have customers that want to consume other technologies through us. They’ve already gone through the legwork of negotiating those terms they want to override. We’re already registered vendors, we can really help companies of all sizes and a lot of startups expedite their sales process with those existing procurement relationships,” he said.