Dollars And Sense
Check Point Software Technologies wants to help partners grow their business by giving them more buying options, ways to boost their profitability, and tools to facilitate customer outreach and acquisition, according to Worldwide Head of Channel Sales Frank Rauch. Rauch said Check Point’s professional services and alliances can help channel partners expand their margins.
“We want to talk about more than a product; we want to talk about how to engage at a customer level,” Rauch said during a keynote address at XChange+ March, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company. “We want to be able to expand your margin profile with professional services, and we want to give you the best-in-class cyber tools.”
Mississauga, Ontario-based Benchmark, No. 317 on the 2020 CRN Solution Provider 500, uses Check Point’s Dome9 product with a lot of customers for cloud security to ensure their infrastructure meets compliance requirements, according to Chief Technology Officer Shlomo Bielak. Bielak considers Dome9 to be Check Point’s top product and has included it in proposals to major financial institutions.
Bielak said he’d like to see Check Point offer partners not-for-resale (NFR) licenses in a structured portal as well as enable them to build their own product demos. NFR licenses would allow partners like Benchmark to stand up instances of Check Point’s technology in their own environment and more easily incorporate it into their own demos focused on orchestration, Bielak said.
Rauch, meanwhile, said San Carlos, Calif.-based Check Point’s partner program is designed to offer the channel profitability and predictability through deal registration and consistent rules of engagement. From lead generation campaigns and customer acquisition tools to enhanced discounts and professional services certifications, here are four ways Check Point plans to make partnering more profitable.
4. Lead Generation Campaigns
Check Point’s channel marketing department has done a great job of putting together marketing material and collateral that make it easier for partners to reach customers and prospects, Rauch said. What’s new this year at Check Point are scalable, pre-packaged campaigns that allow partners to take great content, customize it, and align it to where the channel expects to see profitability and growth.
These lead generation campaigns are pre-packaged and pre-approved by Check Point, allowing for turnkey execution, according to the company. Partners don’t need to do any claiming to take advantage of these pre-packaged campaigns, the company said.
All told, Rauch said these campaigns will make it easier for partners to really go after customers and markets of interest.
3. Professional Services Certification Program
Developing more competency around professional services allows partners to not only expand their margin opportunity, but also increase their value to customers, according to Rauch. The company said its Professional Services Certification Program is intended to help partners develop stronger relationships with customers and close bigger deals.
As part of the program, solution provider engineers become Check Point experts and earn a certificate recognizing their mastery in delivering professional services, according to the company. Participating partners can expect to increase their professional services revenue by more than 300 percent, better address the needs of their customers, and add a specialization that provides a competitive edge.
Partners that become certified around professional services can also expect to have higher annual contract values and stronger customer retention rates, according to Check Point.
2. Enhanced White Space Tool
Partners can give Check Point any account in their install base and the company is able to determine which accounts are most likely to buy cloud, network, remote access or Harmony user security offerings, according to Rauch. By looking at the number of domains and account branches found in the accounts sent over by the partner, Check Point can assess the partner sales opportunities.
Check Point needs only the account name and unique identifier to use its white space tool, Rauch said, meaning that partners don’t need to tell the vendor what they’re currently selling to the customer or who in the organization they’re selling to.
“This is a really valuable tool,” Rauch said. “How great is it to be able to Zoom—or walk into a customer’s office when it’s physically possible—and have this kind of information, and really target your marketing campaigns?”
1. Discounts For Deal Registration, New Technology
Check Point wants to better align partners with its field sales organization to maximize profitability and make sure both sides have common objectives, according to Rauch. Partners that register a deal with a new customer get an extra discount of 25 percent, Rauch said.
Partners that sign customers up for new technologies get an extra discount of 15 percent, according to the company. Rauch said Check Point’s new technologies are exactly what customers are looking for as they migrate to the cloud since they need help securing both their clouds as well as their remote workforce.
Check Point also offers a 12 percent extra discount on Infinity sales, according to the company. Rauch described Infinity as Check Point’s “wraparound, total security play” since it provides customers with unified management and enhanced visibility.