Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Brian Kroneman - Why Simplicity Wins in Channel Strategy
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we dive into the remarkable journey of SentinelOne's channel evolution with Brian Kroneman, AVP of Global Programs and Strategy. From the moment SentinelOne declared itself 100% channel-led, Brian has been instrumental in turning that bold promise into a scalable, data-driven reality.
We unpack how building for partners from day one - architecting for MSPs, simplifying enablement, and aligning incentives, helped the company avoid the all-too-common “channel retrofit.” Brian shares candid lessons on program design, internal alignment, and the tools and metrics that turn partnership theory into predictable growth.
This episode is a masterclass in building programs that scale, evolve with complexity, and prioritize transparency and action over empty noise.
Tune in to hear:
- Why SentinelOne unified its entire partner ecosystem under one program framework
- How to design simplicity into even the most layered channel structures
- The KPIs that truly reflect ecosystem value beyond just bookings
- What automation really means for channel velocity and operational scale
- The renewal insight that unlocked significant retention wins, without lifting a finger
Whether you’re scaling a global partner program or just rethinking how to measure success, this one’s not to be missed.
Connect with Brian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-kroneman/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue at Channext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, brian. How are you doing? Doing well? How are you doing Alex? Yeah, I'm really excited about this one because I think you've got a really interesting history in terms of sort of program leadership and you've been an absolute rocket ship. So excited to unpick some of the lessons and traumas that have come along that journey. Today, maybe for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction around who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, happy to do so. So my name is Brian Cronman. I'm currently the Area Vice President of Global Programs and Strategy for our partner ecosystem here at SentinelOne. I've been here for seven years and going on nine months. I've been quite a ride with us. Prior to that, I was at Proofpoint for five years, and prior to that I was with Symantec through an acquisition that they made with VeriSign, and then before that I was in international development, which is a completely different career from anything in the technology space. So a lot of different places and directions we can go.
Speaker 2:So almost eight years at one vendor, which I think that feels like about nine lifetimes in this market because I think people are on this one and a half year to two year rotation. It feels like Looking back over. Obviously SentinelOne's gone through stupid growth over that eight year period. What are some of the sort of key moments that stand out from a channel strategy perspective that's influenced that success?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, really good question, and I would say, you know, foundationally.
Speaker 1:So before I started and I would say within the first, it was probably three weeks before I started back in 2017, the organization had made the decision right then and there, when we were a tiny, tiny, tiny company, that we were going to be 100% channel oriented, and that meant that, moving forward, all deals had to be transacted with a partner in mind, and if they didn't, then there would be quota ramifications for the sellers on the outset.
Speaker 1:So they were putting their money where their mouth was. Even before I joined, which very few companies were willing to kind of do that even at that point in time, and then secondarily, kind of along those same lines, one of the core pieces of our business is with our managed service providers, and you know a lot of companies. We could see where things were going even at that time, but again, the company had made the decision to re-architect the platform to make it much more usable for managed service providers to essentially own their own tenant and be able to deploy rapidly without any one involvement, and so it was moving towards that direction. So we could say, hey, we've got the technology, we've got the ease of doing business Now. We just have to come in with both of those things and wrap a program around it so that partners know how they can actually be profitable selling SettleOne.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know we did the prep call, but it sort of blew my mind because I see so often that businesses start to build a channel. Once they've hit you know 100 million in revenue, they're starting to work out. Hang on, the unit economics are scaling. The sales team doesn't really work. We need to start building a channel and that's such a painful transition. It's gratifying to hear that, if you sort of build it from the ground up, incorporating that product element which was obviously critical, that actually you've not had to go through any of that difficult transitionary period. I'm sure you had a whole load of other challenges that came along with that. I imagine the partner ecosystem has changed a lot across that eight year period. How do you view that today? You've obviously touched on MSPs, but MSPs and resellers aren't the same and that requires two different programs. How does all of that come together?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a really good question. It's actually a super timely question for us too, because we just last week launched our new Partner One partner program, or Partner One program specifically, which actually unifies everything that we've done with all the different parts of the partner ecosystem into one single umbrella, and happy to talk more about that as we move forward. But ultimately, you're right, the partner ecosystem has shifted quite a bit, I would say. Initially it was very distinct between your resellers and your managed service providers. Today those lines are really blurry Because at the end of the day, you know, customers are talking to partners and then make pivoting left or right at the very, very end of the process when they decide, hey, you know, I want to own the title to the license and I want to actually be the ones who are, you know, putting it in our sock or putting it in our IT environments. Or they're saying, hey, you know what? I've got a better offer for someone to come in and manage on my behalf. And so that distinction. At the end of the day, the partners are the ones who are doing it. They're doing the right thing regardless. And so we're with this new program, which essentially trying to put some flexibility into it and say, hey, come to us, we don't want to make it super difficult, we want to meet you where you are, where your customers are.
Speaker 1:But as far as the evolution over time.
Speaker 1:Beyond that, I think one other interesting thing that we've seen is that when we started, endpoint security is a long, long-standing market.
Speaker 1:It's been there probably since I was in elementary or middle school, and that's a long time ago. And so you go through this evolution and it ends up being it's a very crowded space, tons of different vendors that are out there. You have some sort of innovative new player and they're coming in and you talk to partners and they're like why should we talk to you? We have 20 other vendors in this space on our line card. What is going to make you different? And why should I go back to the customer that I just sold this to, or I've been selling this solution to for 15 years, and tell them it's time to make a replacement? And so just an absolute knife fight at the beginning to really prove your tech out, mostly with the SEs that are at the part, the solution engineers that are at the partners to really call out and say, hey, just get your hands on it, play around with it, see what it does, see where there might be a fit for your end users.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I find interesting there we lovingly describe it as the three Ps at Channex which is, you know, the first thing you build is product, and you've got to make sure that your product is great and valuable and is useful to both the partner and the end user. It's easy to deploy and manage. From a partner perspective, it drives great outcomes from an end user perspective. The problem I see today is that so many businesses are indexed on that first P and there's a lot of great products out there, right, lots of businesses make really great stuff, and so then it sort of comes down to the next two, which is program and personnel. That's what causes the big shift now in the channel, which is hey, why is your program better? Because there's a minimum requirement from a product's perspective.
Speaker 2:But once that minimum requirement is hit, we're looking at programming and the people within your channel. So, are you a joy to deal with? Do you follow up and actually do what you say and say what you do? Um, and you know, from a program perspective I think you even touched on it, you, you even mentioned uh in in your job title it's like, hey, we need to educate partners on why it's beneficial to sell sentinel one, that program piece. I see that being the the most significant differentiator, uh, in the difference between a great technology that does okay and a great technology that does amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'll just let me just echo one thing that you say there, and I think the way that we've kind of orchestrated things throughout the years is just. I think programs can sometimes become too complex and you have to have a data dictionary to understand exactly why it's important and then, on top of that, have a program that's complex, that may change every year or every 18 months or so, and I will say that both of those things are things that we try not to do if at all possible. Try not to do if at all possible. I will tell you, with this program launch that I just mentioned, the last time that we had done anything was probably three or four years ago, which it's actually now overdue to make a change, mostly because business is moving so quickly, our ecosystem is moving so fast. We have to adjust and move up and improve with the times.
Speaker 1:However, even when making these changes, we still want to have some core beliefs, which is to say, it's about activity, it's about engagement, it's about enablement, it's about meeting our people where we are and making it simple to understand what's important to us, so that we can tell partners what's important to them Right. So we want everyone to be aligned in terms of the incentives in a very clean and easy use fashion. Again then using the tools that we have at our disposal and our partners disposal to be able to check our math and say, hey, this is what we're seeing. We see that. You know, joe Smith, over here, your organization took this enablement course two weeks ago. Here you go. That means that you're fully compliant with our requirements. Here you go.
Speaker 2:That means that you're fully compliant with our requirements, and so trying to keep that transparency and that simplicity in the program again provides that predictability that partners need to know that, hey, you're not going to change the rules on me midstream and I can actually build a profitable business. Yeah, interesting to maybe double click on the sort of simplicity of programs. I think the bit that I was sort of marveling. I think how big is your team?
Speaker 1:Brian, we have uh, so between with me, we have four people on my team.
Speaker 2:So four people total running a program that covers GSIs, msps, resellers, dmrs, sis, regional SIs, all of those pieces. I think you sort of touched on it. We're starting to see now that programs are becoming simpler rather than more complicated. You know, there was a big push, I think from very large companies, to be like right here's our GSI program and it's completely different to here's our reseller program, which is completely different to our MSP program. Talk to me about how you cannibalize the workflows between those, while adding simplicity but also making sure that there are enough hard lines in there that you know the GSIs are getting what they need and the resellers are getting what they need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a good question, right? So the way that I sort of think about it and the way our team sort of thinks about it is you know what are the barriers to entry to your various pieces of the program. And so I think the easiest thing to acknowledge is that for a sell partner or a reseller, that's a fairly simple thing for people to do. It means that you know you might have a customer, a couple of customers, they're interested in the solution and you just want to be able to transact the deal, just like you've done every single year with maybe a different vendor. And so we make it very simple, relatively speaking, for someone to join and to be maintained in the program. You know they would receive the relatively low amount of benefits for being at that level of engagement. But then as we start to build up more activity, as we start to work with national partners, the DMRs, like you mentioned, then you start to have much more strategic relationships with those organizations and you can start to pull apart and say, hey, not only are you receiving benefits on the deals, but also predictability in terms of how you can build a business. But then when you look at things like managed partners okay. Well, those managed partners.
Speaker 1:There's a programmatic requirement to say that you have to be able to provide L1 and L2 support. If you can't do that, it's not upon SentinelOne to help you build that framework for yourself. We're not out here to train people how to become a support engineer, how to have a ticketing system. What's your recommendation? How do you orchestrate everything between them? We'll provide you the tool, the security tool, to be able to enable your own existing framework to move forward. But if you don't have that capacity, we would recommend that you go through one of our other partners who can actually orchestrate that a little bit better. You know our managed service provider distributors, like our RMM providers, who do a fairly decent job of that.
Speaker 1:And then, as you move up the stack into your GSIs, your SIs, your service delivery partners, again there's that core competency that has to be there. Again, there's that core competency that has to be there. I think you can't get away from treating a GSI or an SI somewhat uniquely, just given the frameworks that they have and the investments that have to be made with those organizations. No-transcript I. What I would say is I don't know that there's necessarily cannibalization in there, but it's really more about understanding. Okay, if I require this for someone who's just reselling, then you may have to train 150 people to actually get your product relevant in the headspace of anyone who's out there putting you on a product on a bit.
Speaker 2:So you've built this complicated yet simple recipe for sort of how you build programs. I think one of the things that I find interesting is building programs is complicated. Prioritizing them, I think, is even more complicated. How do you decide which partner segments to start with, middle with, end with?
Speaker 1:You know, I think it depends on your own organization's maturity and where the market is buying your solutions. I mean, I will say that, you know, even though we've delivered a program that unifies everything between our sell, our manage tracks, our build tracks and our deliver tracks, our sell track is clearly the most mature. I think it's also the easiest one for an organization to start with. Secondarily, because of the investments we made on the product side, our managed service provider track that one is fairly mature and we know what we're doing. And on top of that, we know what mistakes I wouldn't say mistakes, mistakes, not the right word I would say we've had to evolve based on, now, the size and the scale and the scope of the organization. Again, we've matured to the point to say, hey, listen, we need to take a step back, re-prioritize, re-tier who our partners are and what our focus should be in the managed track itself, so that we can actually provide better service and better delivery to those providers.
Speaker 1:But then, as we start to move forward and as you start to move up market a little bit more, you understand that, ok, we need Our customers are asking for product integrations with key vendors. You can't just stand alone in a crowded space and say, you know, work with me, and just you can do everything that you want to with us. Everything that you want to with us. You've got to be able to work with, in our case, the folks like the Optives and the MindCats and the Proof Points and the Zscalers of the world in order for everything to be orchestrated and work really, really well together. So then that naturally leads to more of that technology integration path or that alliance path that some vendors have. And then when you start to go into other solutions and I would say specifically for us, as we've made more investments into the SIM space, so your event logs everything that's coming in, trying to figure out what's going on in your organization so you can prioritize and actually fix problems when they come up.
Speaker 1:That product, that sphere, is very service heavy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I think previously, when we were just deploying our endpoint solutions, our core solutions in the past, it's pretty easy for someone to stand it up, deploy an agent and it works.
Speaker 1:When you're dealing with terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data that you're ingesting into a system that then needs to be normalized and parsed and all of that fun stuff, there are services, opportunities that aren't just nice to have, there needs to have, and you as an organization need to understand, like, okay, am I going to make that investment or am I going to work with partners whose core competency is focused on delivering that type of service? And so naturally, your organization, our organization, has kind of gravitated towards building out some of those kind of service offerings. I think we probably have a little bit further to go on that side, if I'm being honest, but that's clearly where we're going, and as we start to open up more and more of those types of opportunities, then the conversation becomes even more interesting for those types of integration partners, your GSIs of the world, and you know kind of taking it from there.
Speaker 2:Awesome. You've mentioned that part of your role is sort of measuring or proving the value of the ecosystem and sort of pulling that messaging back internally. When a business is 100% channel led, channel revenue is a poor reflection of the value that the channel is providing. It means you need a whole other set of data to sort of show and indicate what the channel is providing. Talk me through what some of those key metrics are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I think for us it starts to become a difference, that the core metric of everything at this point is around partner sourced, and that partner sourced activity could be, you know, that traditional deal registration, where someone has identified an opportunity that you're not aware of and they bring it through a portal and it comes into our system and our team says, yeah, I don't know anything about it, let's go to town, I'm going to protect you on the investment that you're putting in place. That's just core, and we have our own metrics that are reported all the way up to our CEO that say, hey, this is, this is our benchmark, this is what our goal is for the year from a pipeline generation perspective, from an actual bookings perspective, and we need to, we need to hit that. I mean, I can tell you, generally speaking, how close we were last year and how we're, how we're starting off this year, um, and so that's core to everyone on the team. Beyond that, then it starts to also come through things. We're starting to look more at an influence type play, which is really what the SIs of the world are really interested in. They may not transact at all.
Speaker 1:Similar to that are your integration partners where you're meeting either in the channel or you're meeting at the end customer, and they're not really necessarily sourcing deals per se, but they can be heavily influencing how a deal is going to run or any other sort of delivery partner.
Speaker 1:And so what we are trying to do is marry those two things together in a way that shows the true value of what's happening in the ecosystem. Because, you know, I think one of the things that's that's kind of complex but simple and complicated about the world is that everyone measures revenue, because revenue is easy, bookings are easy to measure, you can set up systems and you can say, all right, if it comes in this way, then it looks like X, comes in that way, it looks like Y, we're done. It's a simple metric. We can track this over time. Blah, blah, blah. That's just not how a customer relationship actually works, where you may have six, seven different partners of different types that are actually influencing a given account. Whether they're transacting or not, they're actually still in your deals and need to understand what's the value of this one versus that one, and that's the message that we're starting to turn the organization around right now. It's just start to look at.
Speaker 2:We've got to figure out how to measure it, but that's how we, that's how we're thinking about it I spend a obviously a lot of time speaking to um channel leaders, right as a function of the podcast and as a function of of my, my job, um, and it's one of the things that I'm always fascinated by, because the channel is slow moving and slow to measure, and then you have a double problem, which is, if you just measure bookings, that's at the end, and so then you have a slow moving thing that you just measure the last data point, um, and so the real challenge with bookings is what happens when you get month three into the year and bookings are behind.
Speaker 2:If you don't have any of that leading indicator, you might have already missed your entire year and you only realized it in month three, yeah, and and because then you've got to enact change. Change takes a while, um, and then arna has to do stuff and the disty has to do stuff, or your aggregator has to do stuff and your teams have, and it's like, and then, hopefully, by month seven, we start to see the uptick and it becomes quite painful, um, given that speed is so critical, I think, to making great decisions and driving continuous performance, how do you think about automation when it comes to program design?
Speaker 1:well, I I'm going to go back in some respects to what I was saying a few minutes ago, in that you have to be able to provide tools that show a partner where they are, and I would also say those tools have to also have an internal facing element so that everyone is on the same page. We have dashboards and we have tiering that says all right, at this moment in time, what is it April the 9th? I can tell you that here's where we are in terms of bookings, in terms of core programmatic requirements, in terms of pipeline, in terms of deal registrations. Incentives earn MDF that's coming through. I can tell you what that looks like today. And then we can keep taking snapshots and building into business plans, building into QBRs, building into slides that are shown internally so that people know exactly like hey, this is where we are with partner, A focus partner in this part of the world. So that's point one.
Speaker 1:The other piece around automation that's, you know, from a workflow perspective is around. You know, whether it's integrating with a disty to ensure that your quotes and your POs and invoices kind of come through, that are clean, that take less of a manual touch, whether your deal registration workflows go to the right people and they are looked at accordingly and you have the right timing associated with it so you can move quickly so that a partner knows early on that they want to partner. We want to partner with them, just like they want to partner with us. So, again, moving it as quickly as we can to ensure that deals don't slip through the cracks. And then I think the other piece that we're starting to put a little bit more emphasis on now is pushing, I would say, more of the opportunity for partners to be able to quote our solutions without us in the door.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you think about things like in the managed environment, where partners have a given buy price with us. Then again they don't have to talk to us to turn on a customer in the environment, they just have to turn it on. We'll build them in arrears. That means it's fast. But for a partner or customer who is interested in quoting a deal, that's I would say it's relatively vanilla, let's just use that term. There's no reason why we can't give them a predictable price or a predictable set of prices or a predictable discount. To say, go out to market with this price. If you can sell it at that, great. And then, if we need to go a little bit deeper, we can come at that point. But at this point we're aligned that this is the right starting point where the market is probably likely to be willing to buy. So it's all about trying. I mean, the partner ecosystem is great for that scalability. You just have to figure out how and where to plug in the various pieces in a way that's going to be efficient for everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that understanding a question I sort of really love asking sort of senior executives when I'm talking through uh channel designers, like which metric do you wish you could turn up to 99? And I think that that gives me a real clear indication in terms of like oh, okay, it's uh time to value for new partner acquisition. It's like okay, I can fully understand exactly what your channel design for the next 12 months looks like. Okay, we're going through rapid acquisition of partners and that amount of value is going to perform to a massive difference as opposed to you know, nrr through partner needs to improve. Okay, so we're on an upsell strategy and that real understanding. But it only works if you've got this great infrastructure of sort of data measurement, because then you can get super precise with your actions to influence a particular data point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's right and I think that what you're talking about is very much how we've looked at relaunching this particular program. You know, obviously there are all different sorts of metrics you could imagine in your mind, but if you can't measure them and you can't measure them predictably and on demand- not only is it useful for a partner, but it's not really useful for your own team.
Speaker 1:You know, if you've got to spend hours and hours trying to calculate something and you can't replicate it the next time you run it or the data changes or something happens, it's not really useful.
Speaker 1:Even if it may be interesting, it's not really useful as a measurement, and so you know, for us, in a subscription world that we live in, you know it does become okay. So what's important to the partner? Well, we can see that, based on how a partner may be valued in the market, what's important to us is that continuous like you talked about that NRR growth. We need to keep seeing not only that we have high retention, low churn, but also upsells, cross-sells, as our platform expands, as our opportunities expand within the market. So you know, it does become sort of those things. And you know, I think, as we start to review the specific details of the program, as folks come and take a a look at it, you'll see where our head is on a lot of these things. Um, but again, like, if you can't measure it consistently, it's interesting but not very useful in terms of how you want to have everyone roll in the same direction I couldn't agree.
Speaker 2:I think it if you, if you understand the data very clearly, it's actually quite quick to change behavior, right? If you say, hey guys, as a whole channel organization, we want to improve time to value for newly acquired partners, let's just pick a metric and you just say, off, you go work out how you think we can change that. People have great ideas and they're suddenly extremely well aligned to a very particular and you very quickly see change. When you say something loose like, hey guys, we want to grow channel revenue, what does that mean? Right, like it's so, it's so ethereal. Um, and so, yeah, I think, uh, I think you guys have built it in a really strong way. Um, yeah, it's a couple of other like things that we've seen pretty recently.
Speaker 1:and again, I don't want to rabbit hole on this and I know we've got a lot of other topics, but you know we've, we've seen recently that um, even simple visibility of renewals that are coming on. So again, going back into the automation, you know very have very few process years of workflows tied around that, but you just make the renewals visible. That increases your attention rate by a percent. That's what the benchmark seems to be. Your distributors want this information. Your core focus partners want this information. They themselves have workflows, even if you don't know what they are.
Speaker 1:So that's an interesting point, even if you don't know what they are. So that's an interesting point. But I think the other thing that you kind of touch on is that classic rebate example where, hey, I've got a target that's in place and if you can provide transparency around where a partner is against achieving that target, you're much more likely to get someone to take a few extra minutes and try and pull something in or create something that may not have been there before in order for them to hit that target, which then is actually meaningful, particularly for the principles of the organization. But you know it's without that level of transparency and visibility, you lose sight of those opportunities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the thing that I really like, right, you gave a very specific data and sort of program answer to renewals. But marketing will give you a marketing answer and channel sales will give you a channel sales answer. And guess what? They're all useful, right. And so if marketing improves it a percent, and data improves it a percent, and sales improve it a percent, and suddenly you're looking across all renewals across a year, you're talking about huge revenue differences, right, the 3% improvement across all renewals in a 12-month life, that represents tens, hundreds of millions of saved or grown revenue. That is why I think having that sort of measurement infrastructure in place and then directing internal and external behavior, that's how you move mountains. At this podcast, we like to be a little bit data orientated, because we ask our current guests to recommend our next guest, which keeps everything flowing very nicely. Brian, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:So he's actually my former boss, Dave Crilley. He's had a number of different roles within channel marketing, channel sales, channel programming organizations, large and small, and he's just a wonderful, wonderful person to speak to. He's a super high thought leader in a lot of these cases, Worked with security companies for quite a bit, but also outside of the security space, and just has a really varied and interesting background. Also just a great conversationalist too.
Speaker 2:There we go. Well, my criteria for anyone who's not aware is they have to sort of have some level of channel vision, but, most importantly, not be boring, because it makes my life so much easier. It sounds like Dave hits both, which is great. Brian, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my pleasure. It's been quite the conversation. I'm super happy to be here. Awesome Thanks, Brian.