Drive Increased Growth in Service Provider Business
Citrix was focused on driving growth through an indirect channel partner model. A key challenge was equipping the Citrix sales team to lead business conversations with channel partners so that each service provider could expand their own business leading to growth for Citrix. Results included lower partner acquisition costs, net new revenue acceleration, and more rapid time to productivity for new channel partners.
DSG’s big idea for Citrix was to operationalize partners and the extended partner community to growth through our indirect channel model. The challenges we felt were unique to us were two-fold.
The first challenge was enabling an extended matrix team with partners, distributors, and other folks that did not belong to Citrix. We needed to enable an extended team. The second challenge revolved around our team here at Citrix. We are experts on our technology, products, and solutions but not necessarily experts in the business. How do we get people at Citrix up to speed to have better, more meaningful business conversations with partners?
Our approach with DSG centered on a series of playbooks and training workshops. We wanted playbooks we could train the team with that would also be used continuously after training. We want them to know the "how" - how to implement playbook content with a partner and how to use it out in the real world. It's collaborative. We have all this knowledge in our brains and we know all this information, but getting it into something consumable like a playbook where we can train and repeat is very high value for us.
We found it impactful to view the training as business training as opposed to product training. We all have product training, but business training led to better employee retention. They felt that we were investing back in the employees, and our ENPS scores were higher as a result. As we took that to the partners, they started to look at us differently. They viewed us not as a vendor trying to push products on them, but began to see us as a vendor trying to help them build a profitable and repeatable business.
There are a few things from this effort that I'm most proud of. We saw results that were both tangible and measurable. The first result was $1 million in quarterly net-new revenue in nine months. That is amazing! We also found results with our partner acquisition cost (our net new cost) that dropped to $2,600, which is best in class for the industry. The third result was what we saw with our productivity. The time it took for people and partners to be productive dropped to less than 95 days. The business became more profitable where we could get revenue quicker as a result.
We saw DSG's involvement provide unique value in our project through three things. The first was an external and expert market view. The second was their credibility vertically and horizontally within our organization. Finally, they were able to take the complex and scattered stuff in our brains and package it into something crisp, consumable, and simple for us to use.
