It’s been a busy first half of the year for GoTo, with the vendor rebranding from LogMeIn and consolidating their offering in to two products – GoTo Connect and GoTo Resolve – to focus on the collaboration and remote support markets, respectively.
UC Today sat down with GoTo’s Vice President of Partner Sales Gerald Byrne, to discuss how the recent changes will empower channel partners.
UC Today: Can you talk us through what’s changed at GoTo this year?
Byrne: It’s been a really terrific time for us as a company. Over the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve been trying to grow our company and develop the products we have with our partners in mind.
As part of that process, we’ve rebranded the company from LogMeIn to GoTo and then separated LastPass as an additional company to operate on its own.
On top of that, we have launched a new partner programme, and we are in the process of completing that structure. We’ve done this thinking about how we develop our products in line with what our partners are looking to do and growing our customer base for those partners.
The most important thing is that we continue to build brand recognition for GoTo so that when our partners go to market, their customers and our customers recognise who we are.
UC Today: GoTo is now placing a greater emphasis on its partner ecosystem – how can we expect to see your channel strategy evolve over the coming months?
Byrne: We have evolved from being a direct company. Over the last five years, we have moved our bookings from being direct-centric to being much more partner-centric.
Five years ago, our partner bookings were around 5 percent, and for 2021 they were 35 percent. Our goal over the next two years is to move that towards 50 percent, which is fantastic, and it’s great to see the evolution of a company to really benefit from what our partners can do.
We are probably the only vendor in the market with two different product sets – one with the UCaaS and CCaaS solutions… and then on the opposite side, we’ve got our GoTo Resolve platform which has Rescue and Central as integral parts of that remote support group.
This allows our partners to target two different types of buyer personas. The partner program has evolved in the sense that as more and more partners give feedback to us, we are continuing to enhance the programme.
UC Today: What type of partners will benefit most from working with GoTo?
Byrne: We look for partners that are willing to work with us and love our products.
We want them to engage proactively with us. On our side, we offer the exact same, if not more, in terms of proactivity, support product enhancements and marketing support.
For me, it’s the continued development of those relationships that is going to be really important for us going forward in terms of how we build out the programme.
UC Today: Can you talk through some of the incentives you’ve put in place for partners?
Byrne: Incentives are definitely something that we put a lot of stock and value in.
In reality, we have incentives based on the products that we want our partners to focus on, and we also have incentives that are aimed at the biggest market opportunities for our partners.
They have definitely developed over the last 12 months in EMEA in terms of how we target the product set and the end customers.
At the moment, we’re running incentives for partners who create demonstrations for their customers, and there are rewards around that.
We also offer incentives for those who are selling GoTo Rescue remote control toolset against our competitors.
There are also incentives for driving and delivering more opportunities on top of the payouts they are already receiving.
UC Today: You’ve mentioned that you’re working on a new partner programme behind the scenes. Can you give us any clues about how that may look?
Byrne: You don’t build a really successful partner programme in a matter of weeks or months.
It takes a long time, and at the core of everything we’re doing with the programme is simplicity of doing business with us.
We hope to have a lot of things that partners would be used to in terms of tiering, structures, support and marketing programs aligned to each of the tiers.
We are in the process of building that out and seeing what areas we can automate and in what areas we can continue to have personal relationships.
At the end of the day, you create a programme to help your partners evolve and be more successful.
