Imperva refreshes global partner program

Cybersecurity vendor Imperva has refreshed its partner program to offer partners more predictable margins and choice when aligning go-to-market strategies.

Partners can also look forward to updated enablement and training opportunities, as well as financial incentives and stronger technical, sales and marketing support.

With the Imperva Accelerate Partner Program, distributors, resellers, and managed security services providers (MSSPs) can choose to engage in four go-to-market strategies.

This includes the choice to open new markets for Imperva, identify new opportunities to ‘pre-qualify’ for a deal registration, lead technical sales with customers, or focus solely on service delivery and support packages.

The Accelerate program will also be tiered – Select, Advanced, and Premier – with corresponding discount levels and investment opportunities.

Distributors can also unlock incremental discounts through deal registration and by leading conversations and technical selling with the customer.

Furthermore, to ease the sales experience, Imperva has offered standardised or “predictable” discounts for all pricing scenarios – this, in hopes of enabling “predictable margins”, which is something that partners have been looking for based on the vendor’s feedback channels.

“The new partner program is built on the basis of better profitability and higher predictability,” said Nelson Soon, Imperva’s channel sales vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). “These were the two key reasons why we changed our program.

“Our partners shared that customers needed Imperva’s solutions – both from the applications security and data security standpoints – and profitability was good but a mixed bag, so we wanted to introduce predictability into the program.”

The new program thus “clearly shows” how partners can earn benefits and incentives, for instance by introducing new customers to Imperva or independently conducting end-to-end sales engagements.

Closing the feedback loop

In addition, partners can now look forward to earning discounts based on deal contribution and rebates that incentivise growth.

Soon told Channel Asia that besides desire for more predictable margins, Imperva’s key global partners feedbacked that while they stood to benefit when they secured new business deals, there was not as clear an incentive for customer renewals.

Hence, with the new program, partners will be entitled to incremental incentives and benefits for renewing customer contracts, especially if they had signed and managed the deal from the beginning.

According to Soon, there will be a proper system in place to track partners’ progress so that they will be rewarded fairly. What’s more, those who demonstrate their ability to drive “on-time renewals” stand to benefit even more.

Imperva will provide the necessary sales, technical and marketing support throughout, as well as training to help manage more of the deal so partners “can increase deal velocity”.

Focused on partner enablement

“Equally important is the feedback that some of our enablement content is quite dated, which is why we’re launching new updated content,” said Soon.

He explained that last year, Imperva focused more on awareness creation for their solutions, but this year they were “doubling down” on enablement efforts through refreshed content, a revamped pre-sales certification program, and introducing badging for partners. They also have a shadowing program as part of their certification and enablement initiatives.

“We want our partners to be an extension of our salesforce,” he said. “That’s why we’re investing a lot on updating our enablement content and making it interactive.”

Soon shared that their efforts on strengthening their channel business is to drive further growth across their target markets, including Southeast Asia – particularly Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam – Australia, India and Japan.

“We have grown our presence in APJ and significantly increased our headcount since I joined Imperva last year,” he said. “More importantly, there’s clear direction to the team and partners that we are a channel-first organisation.

“All new deals are transacted through channel to reinforce our commitment and the partner base has responded very well as we’ve seen massive growth in our partner business in 2022. We’re looking to have bigger growth in 2023.”