New AttackIQ Channel Leader Promotes BAS Opportunities for Partners
The appointment comes at a time of mass expansion in the automated BAS market.
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Channel Futures: Are you planning any changes?
AttackIQ’s John Brown: I´ve already launched a new partner incentive program for customer-facing technical sales leads that offers substantial rewards – $250 for registered and approved meetings, $500 if the opportunity moves to a technical evaluation, and an additional $1,000 if we receive a purchase order before Jan. 31, 2023.
Giving back to the cyber community at large is one of the core tenets of our culture. Clear evidence of that is our AttackIQ Academy, which since its April 2020 launch has amassed more than 35,000 students in over 180 countries across 40-plus free courses. Everyone who attends an AttackIQ Academy training course gets automatically invited to our Informed Defenders Community where thousands of members learn from each other, and these learnings directly influence our innovation. We announced on Thursday that moving forward, partners will be invited to join Informed Defenders for Partners when they register for our online partner training in our partner academy and they’ll be able to take advantage of channel partner exclusive offers, like gift cards for completion of training modules. Another change we have made is that with every channel-sourced opportunity that we successfully close, we now produce a partner win wire that documents all of the key nuggets of information from the win. And we communicate that with that specific partner so that we can collectively share the good news internally to encourage knowledge transfer and better collaboration to drive further opportunities.
CF: What’s at the top of your to-do list?
JB: I anticipate being able to launch our new MSSP Program soon, enabling partners to power their BAS-as-a-service offerings with a truly flexible, consumption-based, pay-as-you-go licensing model. I’m in the midst of rewriting our partner program guide, which I’ll be able to move towards completion once the MSSP Program has been finalized.
Our channel team is expanding, the next hire being a channel sales manager covering the East of the United States. To coincide with our investment in a new learning management system, we will be refreshing our partner sales and technical training courses, triggered by the development of a new ticketing and troubleshooting course for service providers. We face the common scale-up growing pains in professional services, and as such we need to recruit and certify a committed and extremely capable group of service delivery partners. Our next partner all-hands sessions will be on Wednesday, Nov. 16, and we´re also thinking of running remote/in-person partner advisory council sessions again in November.
CF: What do you want AttackIQ’s partners to know about you and what it’s like working with you?
JB: I started my cybersecurity journey in 2003 as a new business sales executive at McAfee. And that paved the way for an early career as a hybrid channel manager – hence why I am as happy in front of enterprise clients as I am working side by side with channel partners. Since 2011, I´ve worked in private equity-funded, high-growth, pre-initial public offering (IPO) cybersecurity vendors – helping them to build and develop their channel operations in Europe and the Middle East. I’m committed to always doing the right thing, and executing everything with passion and conviction. And I’m really good at taking complex stuff and translating it into language that channel partners can understand and easily articulate.
CF: How will your previous experience at Menlo Security and LogRhythm come into play in this new role?
JB: I am guessing that I qualify for industry veteran status having been in cybersecurity for 20-plus years, and that career has been spent building and nurturing channel businesses for a host of well-known names and cyber startups. I spent half of my time at LogRhythm building the Northern Europe and Middle East regions up from nothing, and the rest of the time constructing their GSI business in EMEA. Both were very different roles. In the former, you are the restaurant owner, chef and pot washer combined, busy recruiting and developing a wide variety of partner types. And in the GSI role, you need bundles of patience and perseverance personified. At Menlo, I was responsible for their EMEA channel business dealing with the same partner names that I will be working with at AttackIQ. And it was a logical career step for me to take up a global role after Menlo.
CF: What sort of opportunities does BAS present to the channel?
JB: BAS is a non-commoditized, non-saturated, technology space and AttackIQ is running at an 80% win rate when we embark in a head-to-head technical evaluation, which should give partners immense confidence in our ability to perform when it matters. We typically maintain a 30% professional services attach rate, which provides lots of lucrative services opportunities in the future for our partners. After a thorough, multi-phase process that began in 2021 and included several levels of evaluation and ultra-rigorous security assessments, last week we were finally able to announce that we are the first and only BAS vendor to have been granted a three-year Assess Only Authority to Operate by the U.S. Army. This is huge news for partners. If AttackIQ can pass intensive U.S. Military scrutiny, it´s safe to say that it’ll be good enough for any of the partners’ accounts, whatever the sector.
CF: What are AttackIQ partners’ main pain points and how will you be addressing those?
JB: BAS is a growing market, and there is still a lot of education that has to happen during the sales process. If partners don´t engage us early, then their sales cycles can be frustrating. To help counteract this, our salespeople are coached to follow a playbook that ensures they deliver compelling, challenging and teaching-led sales engagements every time. Why’s that important? Salespeople think that they influence the sales process 80% of the time. But customers say it’s actually 5%. And in more than half of all sales engagements, the customer’s buying decision is influenced by the way salespeople conduct the sales process and the questions they ask. And these sales engagements become even more critical, because 80% of due diligence is done before a buyer engages vendors/sellers. And so our playbook is us aiming to completely nail every sales conversation we have – and thus deliver a quicker time to value (TTV) for the customer, which partners ultimately benefit from.
Monetizing the BAS opportunity can be challenging for some partners. There is undoubtedly significant value in using our technology to power one-off temporary advisory assessments. But reselling customers a BAS platform or a managed service that continuously validates and improves their key production security controls is where partners will secure sizable recurring revenue numbers and deliver optimum value for their customers. In a nutshell, partners are leaving revenue on the table by only delivering one-off assessments. And they’re also leaving the door ajar for competitors to get a foothold in their accounts.
CF: What are AttackIQ partners’ main pain points and how will you be addressing those?
JB: BAS is a growing market, and there is still a lot of education that has to happen during the sales process. If partners don´t engage us early, then their sales cycles can be frustrating. To help counteract this, our salespeople are coached to follow a playbook that ensures they deliver compelling, challenging and teaching-led sales engagements every time. Why’s that important? Salespeople think that they influence the sales process 80% of the time. But customers say it’s actually 5%. And in more than half of all sales engagements, the customer’s buying decision is influenced by the way salespeople conduct the sales process and the questions they ask. And these sales engagements become even more critical, because 80% of due diligence is done before a buyer engages vendors/sellers. And so our playbook is us aiming to completely nail every sales conversation we have – and thus deliver a quicker time to value (TTV) for the customer, which partners ultimately benefit from.
Monetizing the BAS opportunity can be challenging for some partners. There is undoubtedly significant value in using our technology to power one-off temporary advisory assessments. But reselling customers a BAS platform or a managed service that continuously validates and improves their key production security controls is where partners will secure sizable recurring revenue numbers and deliver optimum value for their customers. In a nutshell, partners are leaving revenue on the table by only delivering one-off assessments. And they’re also leaving the door ajar for competitors to get a foothold in their accounts.
AttackIQ partners have a new global channel leader. John Brown, previously with Menlo Security and LogRhythm, has joined the breach and attack simulation (BAS) provider as its head of global channel.
AttackIQ’s John Brown
Brown’s appointment comes at a time of mass expansion in the automated BAS market. Global revenue should surpass $3.5 billion by 2026.
Growing demand for BAS technologies will lead to a massive increase in global partners, AttackIQ said.
Here’s our list of channel people on the move in July. |
Brown previously was Menlo Security‘s director of EMEA channels. Before that, he was LogRhythm‘s EMEA director of strategic alliances.
Rapid Partner-Fueled Growth
In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Brown talks about what AttackIQ partners can expect from his channel leadership.
Channel Futures: What’s your take on AttackIQ’s current channel strategy and partner program?
John Brown: I´ve inherited a really solid foundational base, with a strong core of dedicated partners that have been early pioneers in selling and promoting AttackIQ BAS offerings. We operate a single-tier model in the United States where partners buy directly from AttackIQ, and a two-tier distribution model everywhere else. And that won´t be changing.
As it stands, we have 118 authorized global channel reseller partners (half U.S., half international). And I anticipate that that number will grow by an additional 25-40 before [Jan. 31]. But let me stress that we are seeking quality over quantity. A quality partner should be able to comfortably deliver three net new BAS opportunities every quarter. That’s per country/subregion they’re active in.
One of the most important methods that any vendor uses to measure the effectiveness of its channel partner ecosystem is deal registration. And we are looking to grow that by at least 60% this year, which we’re absolutely killing at the moment, having just completed a record quarter for the company and the highest number of channel deal registrations ever. We expect more than 20% of our total closed-won business will be channel-sourced and registered, andthe incremental pipeline contribution from channel partners for the year will exceed 25% of our overall pipeline number. We’re currently tracking at around 40%. And what we’re seeing and hearing from our channel partners is that BAS is a hot space. And they’re really not struggling to find opportunities.
See our slideshow above for more from AttackIQ’s new global channel leader.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Edward Gately or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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