Elastic brings partners closer in channel push

Search, observability and security vendor Elastic is upping its efforts to engage partners, including a mandate to their sales force to include partners earlier in the sales cycle.

Global vice president of partner sales, Alyssa Fitzpatrick, told techpartner.news that the company was building a “co-selling culture”.

She said Elastic’s salespeople weren’t engaging reseller partners until late in the sales cycle and so rules were put in place to address that.

“We've rolled out a set of working with partner engagement rules through our entire sales force, in which they learned exactly how we want the engagement earlier in the sales cycle, collaboratively with our partners and what that means," she said.

Fitzpatrick, along with Elastic’s VP of global partner sales international Andrew Habgood, outlined a renewed focus on partners. 

Habgood said they are improving their training to make partners as independent as possible in the sales process.

“[Partners were saying], 'there's so much to the Elastic portfolio we're struggling to position all these things', so our sales team would have to accompany the partners quite a bit," he told us.

"Now, we are making every bit of sales training that we do – how we do the sales plays that we run for our sales team, the approaches that we take – we're making that accessible to the partners, because they're an extension of us. If they're dependent on us, then we're not effective together.”

Fitzpatrick said Elastic is also providing greater enablement and training for partners, both around the products that they sell and how the products can be applied.

“The opportunity … is to come together and understand the customer need and start to build repeatable use cases, build solutions that we can take to our customers, so that when we are having the conversations and they share with us their challenges, we can offer differing use cases that can solve that problem," she said.

According to Habgood, Elastic is also endeavouring to bring more managed service providers on board.

“We're adding more managed service providers in the ANZ market," he said.

"MSPs address different needs. Some address the top end of town and large, outsourcing type arrangements, while others give scale by delivering outcomes to the mid-market, or use our solution behind them to take an outcome service, so we know that there is that opportunity, and we're recruiting more at the moment.”

He said that they are also leaning on Tech Data, their distributor for the region, to add more support for local partners.

“Tech Data are helping us to provide more resources for each of those partner types, so we have more pre-sales, more post-sales, more support so that we've got more hands and bodies to actually help resellers.”

He added that the company was remaining thoughtful about the partners it onboarded, aiming for a “balanced ecosystem” across verticals and partner types.

“We're absolutely continuing to grow our reseller base, but what we want to make sure is that it's not a race to the bottom," he said.

"This is a value play. Elastic is a complex solution, it is an outcome solution, so we're looking to recruit partners that … can be additive.”