MSPs have plenty of complexity to manage already. Their vendor relationships shouldn’t add more of it.
That thinking is driving a series of changes at Barracuda, where the cybersecurity vendor is reworking its partner experience around a fairly straightforward goal: Make it easier for MSPs to engage with the company, build expertise, find opportunities and grow their businesses. Recent updates to the Barracuda Partner Success Program include new demand-generation capabilities, an expanded training and badging program and changes to the partner portal designed to simplify engagement.
For Michelle Hodges, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Barracuda, those individual investments are part of a larger effort to rethink what partners should expect from a vendor. That means giving MSPs more flexibility in how they work with Barracuda, providing practical sales and customer-success resources and helping them prepare for emerging opportunities around AI, cybersecurity and compliance.
An effort to make partnering easier
In a recent conversation with ChannelPro, Hodges shared four areas where Barracuda is trying to reduce friction for its MSP partners. This includes some lessons MSPs can apply when evaluating their own vendor relationships.
1. Stop forcing partners into boxes
The traditional lines separating MSPs, MSSPs, resellers and other channel business models are getting harder to draw. Barracuda wants its partner program to reflect that.
The company has been working to unify its partner program and portal around the idea that, as Hodges put it, “a partner is a partner.” Meanwhile, it is still allowing businesses to differentiate based on their personas and business models.
That includes offering different approaches to co-selling and account planning based on the partner and making incentives available regardless of how that partner sells Barracuda’s products.
That flexibility could become important as more traditional MSPs expand their cybersecurity practices. Hodges said she personally doesn’t draw a significant distinction between MSPs and MSSPs because Barracuda already sits in cybersecurity. She also expects AI to accelerate the convergence as MSPs that already manage Microsoft 365 and provide some email protection encounter more security needs from customers.
Barracuda has built its platform so those partners can continue expanding the cybersecurity conversation in a way that’s easy to buy, deploy and use, she said.
Michelle Hodges
MSP takeaway: Your business may look different two years from now. Look for vendor programs that can accommodate that evolution without forcing you to change programs, relationships or routes to market every time your service mix changes.
2. Give MSPs sales and marketing resources they can actually use
Partner portals aren’t particularly useful if MSPs have to hunt through them for the one asset that might help close a deal.
Barracuda is emphasizing more actionable sales and marketing resources. Its latest Partner Success Program enhancements include:
- A through-channel marketing automation platform that supports co-branded campaigns, social and email syndication
- Turnkey “do-it-for-me” campaign execution
- Plans to launch a Partner Locator designed to connect customers with certified partners
Hodges pointed to Barracuda’s monthly co-selling and account-planning initiative as an example. “We send out sales teams, stand up a digital sales room, and load it up with all the sales plays and the call scripts and propensity data,” she said.
The company’s partner portal also is getting role-based segmentation and automation. That includes guided journeys to help partners get started with activities such as co-selling.
The common thread is an attempt to move beyond simply giving MSPs resources and toward helping them put those resources to work.
MSP takeaway: Don’t evaluate a partner program by how much content a vendor puts in its portal. Ask how quickly your sales and marketing teams can turn those resources into actual customer conversations and pipeline.
3. Help MSPs keep the customers they already have
Acquiring new customers is only one part of profitable growth. Keeping them matters, too.
That’s an area where Barracuda is expanding the scope of its Partner Success Program. The company has long had a partner success team, Hodges noted, but much of its work traditionally centered on administrative issues such as billing.
Now, Barracuda wants to apply more of its customer-success capabilities to partners. “We’ve got tons of great customer success tools,” Hodges said. “Why not point that at the MSPs, or partners in general, so we can show them where they’re winning, or give them early signals and help them understand where they might churn.”
It’s a notable expansion of what vendor enablement can mean. For MSPs, a vendor relationship that helps identify potential churn or reveals opportunities within an existing customer base can provide value well beyond traditional discounts, rebates and marketing funds.
It also aligns with Barracuda’s broader push to spend more time engaging with partners throughout the customer life cycle rather than limiting those relationships to individual transactions.
MSP takeaway: Ask vendors what they can do to help protect your installed base, not just add to it. Data that helps spot churn risk, customer needs or expansion opportunities can be every bit as valuable as another lead.
4. Prepare MSPs for the conversations customers haven’t started yet
AI is creating new technology opportunities, so MSPs shouldn’t hold off on addressing them until their customers arrive with questions, Hodges advised. “Don’t wait for the customer to ask you about AI compliance or even cybersecurity. You need to get in front of them and educate them.”
Barracuda is trying to give partners more tools to do that. Its Barracuda Mastery Program starts with platform-level certifications and allows partners to build deeper product expertise. Barracuda’s latest Partner Success Program enhancements add deeper role-based learning, technical labs and advanced sales and technical badges.
AI and compliance badges also are expected to be added to Barracuda Mastery. The goal isn’t simply to educate MSPs about Barracuda products. There are opportunities for partners to use AI and compliance expertise to identify new services and grow their businesses.
Vendors can play an important role in helping MSPs figure out what those opportunities look like, she added. “Lean on your vendors.”
Her message to partners: Task vendors with helping you work through emerging challenges rather than trying to figure everything out alone.
MSP takeaway: The best vendor relationships should help you see around corners. Use vendors’ research, training and broader partner communities to anticipate the questions customers will ask next. Then, start those conversations before your clients address them.
A higher bar for vendor relationships
Barracuda’s investments point toward a broader definition of partner enablement. Training, incentives and marketing resources still matter, but Hodges sees opportunities for vendors to do more. That can range from helping partners identify potential churn to supporting account planning to preparing MSPs for emerging customer needs.
That requires execution. Barracuda has a long-standing channel program, Hodges said. The company is now looking for ways to add more value across the customer life cycle and create more opportunities to engage directly with partners. With CEO Rohit Ghai, Barracuda is leaning into a “partner first and partner only” philosophy while tightening how the company executes on it, Hodges said.
For MSPs, there’s a useful standard in that approach regardless of which vendors sit in their technology stacks. As AI, cybersecurity and compliance make the services business more complex. That’s why vendors should be taking some complexity out of the partnership itself.
That means MSPs can expect more than products, portals and partner discounts. They can ask whether vendors are helping them sell more effectively, develop expertise faster, retain customers and identify what’s coming next.
If the answer is yes, the vendor relationship is doing more than supplying technology. It’s making the MSP’s business easier to run.
Anjali Fluker is managing editor of The ChannelPro Network, where she covers news, trends and best practices for the MSP community. She specializes in telling the stories that matter to IT providers serving the SMB market. When she’s not reporting on the latest in managed services, she’s connecting with channel pros at industry events across the country.
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