How Kaspersky drives growth in Australia and New Zealand

Rebecca Nguyen opens up about leading Kaspersky Lab’s Australian channel, collecting awards and settling into a role created just for her.

Journey

I was recommended and referred into the role by the managing director of Kaspersky Lab’s distributor Exclusive Networks, which was called Whitegold at the time. We worked together during my time with Optus. I joined the Kaspersky Lab family in 2012 and had a steady climb up the ladder, from development roles to the channel manager for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), and then the enterprise sales manager for ANZ in 2016. I have been Kaspersky Lab’s top female sales performer in ANZ for five years now. 

Program and events

The Kaspersky Lab Partner Program is specifically designed for our regional partners to grow their business and enhance profitability with our award-winning security solutions. By joining it, partners are offered a wide range of benefits, training, certifications, marketing support and rewards. 

We host an annual partner conference. Last year, our channel partner Globalnet Solutions won reseller of the year for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, showing more than 400 percent growth in 2015. 

We also have our annual Partner Engage events in Sydney, Melbourne and, for the first time, Auckland. Our founder, Eugene Kaspersky, will be here in May for those.

Challenges

One of my biggest challenges is dealing with different business cultures, given that ANZ report into the APAC region. For example, sales is done very differently in countries like Malaysia, Thailand or Vietnam, compared to how they are done here in ANZ. Our business engagements and cultural views on processes can be viewed differently to cater for regional office requirements. 

Achievements

I am passionate about solving problems, journeying and building good business relationships, which has translated to great success for Kaspersky Lab. 2017 is already off to a great start, as my team and I have surpassed our targets by almost 20 percent. I also hit 100 percent of my allocated first quarter revenue targets. Throughout the past four years, I have driven channels to hit consistent growth. This has resulted in a great double digit year-on-year growth within channel regions that I have previously managed.

Future

Kaspersky Lab has made several positive hires in recent months. 

The company promoted me from channel sales manager in ANZ to enterprise sales manager, a brand new role, while also creating new positions for territory managers based in Auckland. 

Under the leadership of general manager Peter Brady, Kaspersky Lab ANZ has officially brought on a full B2B sales team with three new channel managers covering the North and South regions of ANZ. 

Recent partner project

Moree Plains Shire – the spa capital of Australia – is a rich agricultural

shire with daily air and rail links from Sydney into the township of Moree. The customer’s main challenge was using a mixed bag of systems where some were not necessarily working. Various end point attack vectors and a central management console were key requirements to include in their market approach. This was the first time our partners Secure ISS and MPSC crossed paths.

Secure ISS was able to meet the customer’s requirement for coverage for CryptoLocker, other end point attack vectors, and a central management console with Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business. 

The success of this project exceeded the client’s expectations and resulted in further engagements.This also resulted in Kaspersky Lab and Secure-ISS winning the WorkCover Queensland deal, which went to tender for an endpoint project.