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RunZero looking for UK channel growth
Security player is working with a distributor and has hired staff to support a push to establish a partner base
RunZero has stepped up its investment in the UK and is looking to build a channel base to carve out increased market share over the course of this year.
The security specialist hired its first handful of UK staff last summer, and is working with distribution player Distology to support and build a select partner base that can deliver growth.
Joe Taborek, chief revenue officer at RunZero, said he had worked with the channel across his career and was looking to replicate those successes as it cranked up its indirect operations.
“We hire people that are just as fluent with the partner landscape across our sales organisation,” he said.
“But it starts with how you configure your pitch. We do a very good job understanding what customers need from RunZero and what partners need.”
Taborek said RunZero was working with distribution to get in front of more partners and had already struck a series of relationships across EMEA.
“We’ve enlisted Distology in the UK specifically, and a couple of other distributors in other regions, one in the Benelux, France, Poland area, another one for the Middle East,” he said. “We are trying to selectively pick the partners that understand the security landscape.”
Marketing and development
Taborek added that working with the second tier of the channel was providing access to valuable insights into partner marketing and development.
“When you have 500 customers, you’ve kind of figured out what you would call product marketing,” he said. “That’s enough repetition and enough years and enough client success to say, ‘We know who buys our stuff and why they buy it. We know the value that they get from it, and they tell us that every day’.”
Taborek said the next step was to build the knowledge of partners, and that meant increasing the understanding of the UK, and putting feet on the ground to support and deliver the go-to-market strategy. “We need to hire local people,” he said. “We need to enlist local partners, and that’s how we’re going to scale the business and make sure that our existing customers are massively successful.”
Taborek added that traditionally, vendors looked to distributors to provide volume and velocity, but it wanted a more consultative approach, and for Distology and its other partners to provide a more focused service.
“We’re being very intentional about building deep strategic partners with just a select group of focus partners that are aligned with our vision,” he said. “We are prioritising quality over quantity, and that way, we can do better enablement, we can do better alignment, like tighter collaboration with a handful of partners, and ultimately [that leads to] stronger outcomes.”
Taborek said the UK was a key market for RunZero, and it was continuing to expand headcount and viewed it as a market that offered real potential for a firm pitching tools that identified risks across an entire network, which were often missed by legacy competitors.
“If you look at the pie chart of the customers we have across EMEA, the UK is number one in terms of the volume of those customers,” he added. “If you can plant your flag in the UK, get repeatable success and branch out from there. While we have partners in other countries – across other regions, across EMEA – the UK is our number one priority at the moment.”
