Daniel Bernard (CrowdStrike)
Cyber security vendor CrowdStrike has revealed a new Accelerate partner program with credit-based incentives and a new marketplace.
The new Accelerate program features solution-specific go-to-market tracks, new-age “edutainment,” gamified rewards, as well as a host of sales, marketing, and partner support tools.
CrowdStrike chief business officer Daniel Bernard said with more products and technologies to sell than ever before, there's further opportunities for partners to build services around CrowdStrike and customise how they want to go to market.
“Having the right education for modern partners is really important,” Bernard shared with ARN. “If we can inspire partners, we're going to see the results we want because we have the story to tell them about the product.”
“We want to be the easiest vendor for partners to work with and the most rewarding.”
The new Accelerate program introduces CrowdClass, an educational series featuring CrowdStrike experts in bite-sized video formats. Available on-the-go and on-demand, sub-10 minute videos share CrowdStrike expertise, prove differentiation and show partners how to sell, demonstrate value and win.
Within the program is CrowdCard, which CrowdStrike deems as “a first in cybersecurity” where individual sales and solution engineering professionals earn cashback rewards on a branded CrowdStrike debit card.
Rewards incentivise new customer transactions as well as platform expansion across strategic solution areas.
In addition, Accelerate rewards partners with attractive margins, discount tiers and back-end rebates in building focused, profitable CrowdStrike practices.
“Our new Accelerate program turns the page for partners of all types to supercharge their CrowdStrike practices - horizontally across the Falcon platform - and vertically into the depth of our solution capabilities,” Bernard said. “New education formats, new sales tools and new rewards are just a few of the investments we’re making to set the cybersecurity ecosystem standard.”
The program also contains new infrastructure and operational enhancements that make it easier and faster for partners to create demand, register opportunities, run value-based sales campaigns and close deals.
A new self-service marketing campaign platform called The Grid offers landing pages, emails and social posts.
The security vendor also took the wrappers off its Marketplace featuring an ecosystem of compatible security products.
CrowdStrike Falcon customers can discover, try and buy complementary security solutions.
At launch, Marketplace members include Armis, Claroty, Elevate Security, ExtraHop, Google VirusTotal, Lookout, JumpCloud, Okta, Tines and X-Analytics. The line-up will continue to expand over time.
The Marketplace also features a new CrowdCredits incentive program that allows select customers to purchase Marketplace products with significant financial savings.
“With CrowdStrike Marketplace, we give customers a modern, streamlined way to tap into our vast network of trusted partner offerings and find the right solutions they need for their business. Best of all, customers will have more flexibility and can receive one consolidated CrowdStrike invoice - simplifying the process for them even more,” Bernard added.
During its APAC partner conference in August, Bernard spoke about partner education and demonstrating customer value as a couple of the foundations that it was emphasising in its ‘partner central’ approach.
“Activating, energising and inspiring the partner ecosystem is more critical than ever before and will help take us further in the market and multiply our efforts,” Bernard said.
Earlier this month, CrowdStrike also launched Falcon Complete for service providers, a new program for partners with managed security services portfolios.
The program aims to reward managed security service providers (MSSPs), managed service providers (MSPs), system integrators (SIs) and global system integrators (GSIs) with benefits and offer support to expand their security portfolios, close skills gaps and strengthen internal teams.
