Yvette McEnearney (GoTo)
When Yvette McEnearney first joined what was then LogMeIn in 2019, there wasn’t a huge amount to work with on a channel front.
At that time, the United States-based collaboration software vendor had only an e-commerce business and a referral business, and, as a result, only did six per cent of its sales through the channel in Australia and New Zealand.
However, three years and a lot of partner initiatives later, the newly rebranded GoTo is now sitting on a healthy 50 per cent channel sales model with a 100 per cent target set firmly in sight.
For McEnearney, GoTo’s director of channel in Asia Pacific, the impetus for the vendor’s channel push – and her appointment – came off the back of its unified communications-as-a-service business three years ago.
“When I joined, we were about to launch our UCaaS model into market,” she told ARN. “I said we need to be 100 per cent channel to get traction with partners in that space because of that legacy and because our competitors have been in the channel for a couple of years. To entice the partners, we needed to be 100 per cent channel. So that was the catalyst.”
As McEnearney noted, competitor vendors such as Avaya already had a head start in the A/NZ UCaaS channel market.
Given GoTo’s previous low presence among A/NZ partners, McEnearney, a former senior manager at Extreme Networks, had to convince several cautious partners to come on board.
“The first thing we had to do was reiterate that we wanted to heavily invest in the channel,” she explained. “Partners were a little bit hesitant of course because we hadn’t really invested there before. There had to be a lot of education internally on why this was effective for us.”
Already a familiar figure among UCC partners, having previously spent eight years at Avaya between 2004 and 2011, McEnearney’s strategy first involved demonstrating how potential GoTo partners could gain a bigger “wallet share” in that space.
“When you give something, you obviously want something back in return,” she said. “And you want to be relationship-building. I went to several partners who I thought would be a good fit and it just grew from there.”
“We had nothing to lose."
Since McEnearney’s appointment, LogMeIn has undergone a number of changes notwithstanding its rebrand to GoTo. These include spinning off its LastPass brand into its own company and launching a number of bundles and integrations to its UCC product, GoToConnect, and contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) system.
Having firmly established a robust number of new partners in A/NZ, including value-added resellers, managed service providers and distributors, McEnearney’s next step was to familiarise as many with the technology as possible.
“I’m a big advocate of getting them to use our technology, so we really try to incentivise that,” she said. “We do a lot of enablement training and ‘office hours’ to make sure they’re ahead with any changes to the program, build out case studies to support what we’re doing and give access to demos."
Unsurprisingly, GoTo’s collaboration and remote work software was one of the many technologies to see a sudden upsurge in demand at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Two years on, and the conversation has turned much more heavily towards hybrid workplaces, rather than full-time remote work, McEnearney explained. While this has not dampened GoTo’s sales, it has changed its approach.
“It’s different now and it’s very much about that hybrid workspace,” she explained. “There’s lots of consolidation going on with businesses and lots of new businesses emerging. This means there are lots of new avenues for us to capitalise on. We’re still selling just as much but it’s different.
“People do want to react with their customers more and they don’t want to lose any calls. They really want to be there. That’s where the expansion of our UCaaS into our CCaaS plays well: people want the same interactions whether they are calling or emailing a company.”
One thing the hybrid work environment has boosted for GoTo is the demand for off-site IT teams, which has driven the expansion of its own remote support solution.
“We’re building this out and really making this a channel-friendly product,” McEnearney said. “We’re working with existing partners but also really looking at new ones in that space.
“A lot of customers and partners are struggling with staff so that whole customer experience piece has become critical. Also, for us, we want to make sure the channel is always up to speed with customer experience so they can take it back to their own clients.”
As GoTo looks to further expand its A/NZ channel ecosystem, McEnearney has the following advice for prospective partners looking to join the vendor’s program.
“It’s about really understanding what the customer is looking for and listening to them,” she said. “You want to make sure our technology is meeting their needs. That necessitates discovery, a rapport and being able to put a solution together that’s going to be helpful.
“Beyond that, it’s about longer-term support and to keep developing that [solution]; build those long-term customer relationships. And it is profitable. But you do need to make sure you’re really aware of the customer’s requirements rather than selling them something that may not meet their needs.”
