N-able

Stefanie Hammond is head sales and marketing nerd at N-able. She believes that in the modern channel, relationships and community are much more important than they have been in the past.

“People want to deal with people,” said Hammond. “Trust is a huge part of the buyer’s decision-making process, which is why focusing on educating the channel and learning more about partner challenges is so important to the sales journey.

“At N-able, we’ve gone back to our roots. The focus is on developing and growing our partner community. The MSP institute, the Head Nerd team and the partner success managers are all non-commission-based programs at N-able. Our main objective here isn’t to make sales, it’s to get involved in the partner community and learn about the issues they are facing so we can help them grow as a business. This enables sales— which is the goal — but not the immediate objective.

“We find that many people in the partner community fell into the MSP marketplace because they knew the technology but didn’t know about business or marketing. It’s been our job to teach them the right skills, so we can help them succeed. Because we’re not blindly focused on the bottom line, we develop stronger relationships with our partners and as they grow, we grow.”