Video: How GoTo And Partners Enable The Remote Workforce

hello and welcome to this episode of partner POV brought to you by goto I'm your host Katie boso remote and hybrid work have gained popularity since 2020 meaning more and more employees are working from anywhere go to and its Partners keep businesses running smoothly with efficient communication Solutions it management and support for the remote Workforce I'd now like to welcome my guest today Global head of IT partner sales and strategy at goto Tony Hower thanks for joining me Tony hey thanks for having me thank you of course of course now I know we've got basketball on the mind you're representing your son's team today where are you headed to after this uh heading to a middle school basketball game so I get the the pleasure of yelling at a bunch of seventh and eighth graders after this but I love it I absolutely love coaching so it's it'll be great time I was going to say the yelling is for coaching purposes only we promise only yeah well fantastic so Tony let's get to know goto I would love to get an overview of it for those who are joining us today and meeting you for the first time so in your own words how do you describe goto and who are your customers we deliver a huge wide uh portfolio of different types of solutions and it can range anywhere on the phone side of it with our go to connect it can also be on our meeting side of it with go to meeting and then the area of the business that I focus on is all of our it products so go to resolve go to rescue uh maybe even some Central if some of our Legacy partners are listening and so you know it's Unique in the fact that we cover all this big wide gamut of of different solutions and then you couple that with the fact that you know our heritage really sits in it so some of your listeners may have heard us as logged me in in the past that's kind of where our original kind of birth was uh we've been around for decades in this space and you know we were actually kind of the gold stand standard originally around remote access and then when you think about this wide portfolio of things that we do naturally our customer base is kind of that wide breath as well and so we work from the large of the large in the Enterprise space all the way down to small business SNB customers so how do your Solutions help support a largely remote Workforce as I alluded to in the beginning and what makes go-to Solutions stand out from the competitors who also support this space you know it's kind of in our DNA I mean go to resolve was specifically designed to solve those problems right when you think about you know hybrid workforces you know completely remote workforces the fact that we with our platform allow uh it professionals to go access a device anywhere in the world that's kind of the the core underpinnings of it and so when you take that as kind of a concept but then you add in some of the what I would consider kind of the secret sauce stuff that we do around using you know I always consider it as like AI for normal everyday folks or a really practical AI uh that can actually solve some real problems and and be really you know powerful uh along with just a really clean user interface so making things simple I think that's the that is kind of the key of how you take all these really complex things and deliver them in a simple way security is is kind of our in our underpinings right we we're built on a zero trust framework so that's kind of uh you know from the ground up which is critical uh to us most of our customers you know security is definitely on top of their mind as well let's dig into zero trust a little bit more because I noticed that zero trust and a simplified approach to Asset Management are two recurring themes within the go-to ecosystem so tell me why and what other Frameworks do you build your solution offerings around to give customers not only what they want but what you know they need it didn't happen by accident when you think about you know zero trust and and simplified Asset Management those two pieces solve critical business problems today as as we see it and as we hear from our customers and so those were the the two pieces that we really focus in on zero trust has become more and more important and really what I would consider is kind of the new standard right perimeter defense doesn't really work anymore with all these devices floating around that aren't in an office anymore so we started with zero trust as kind of the core underpinnings of how we built our solution with the whole idea of saying hey we're not going to trust everything we're going to always verify you have to prove who you say you are as a device and that's how we'll let you into the network keeping that simple I think is really where the magic happens you know security usually leads to to a lot of friction uh when out to the end user as well as the people that actually administer the solution so that was another really key element of saying Hey how do we still maintain security but making it easy to use make sure that our end customers don't have so much friction that they can't get their job done and that's kind of how we got to where we are today from a platform standpoint of really trying to embrace both of those the second part of your question around um just making sure that people have you know what they need one of the things that we've done is really try to be Forward Thinking in our approach as I mentioned earlier that our idea around AI is not just to say we have ai and do some cool things today but really thinking about Forward Thinking of how can we solve real problems right how can we give time back in the day to our MSP Partners how can they deliver an even better approach to their uh their overall Service delivery out to their end customers and really think kind of down the road of what are other elements that they would need to help Drive their business forward very well put and I think that's so important for customers but we also want to think about your partners their of course profitability their opportunities with you so how does goto help its Partners turn these Frameworks that we just talked about into a revenue opportunity so definitely around Service delivery that is a key opportunity for our partners to generate Revenue right I mean at the end of the day most msps only care about a couple different things it's really around profitability security and how do I reduce time right and all three of those kind of center around profitability at some point or another and so you know because of our solution being super easy to implement uh very intuitive uh lots and lots of automation you're able to reduce a lot of the tech time so that way you can actually go be more profitable you can take those technicians and go repurpose them to do more customer facing things which will obviously Drive customer experiences so not only can go-to Solutions be sold by msps msps can also use your Solutions in their own businesses explain that to me who who makes a good fit to use go-to Solutions and what makes an MSP a good fit to sell those Solutions as well yeah that's one of the really neat things about our solution is that it can Empower an MSP to uh actually work on behalf of their end customers to you know manage their overall it environment but then also uh we do a lot of work in the SNB and Enterprise environment so you could even have you know traditional end users actually being able to consume our product and when I think about you know what is kind of a good fit or like where do we win most often uh it's typically people that you know msps are looking to grow their business they don't necessarily want to do it with adding more headcount which is hard nowaday with trying to find labor and keep them and payroll and all the kind of messiness of that and so can you scale your business by leading into technology and that's really where we seem to resonate really well in the market with folks that say Hey like I want to find ways to automate I want to streamline I want to deliver a a rock solid experience to our end customer and that's where we fit in and and that same kind of concept comes when you look at um our actual end user customer base of saying hey I'm a small internal it shop I want us to automate I don't necessarily have the breadth of all these technicians to do all this work so can I do more with less and that's another great bit for us let's talk about the goto partner Network you join goto at the very beginning of 2024 to support this partner program so what other Investments is go to making in its partner program right now in addition to yourself I love this question because we've done so much so I am closing in on right about a year uh here it go to and where we've gone and where we're heading is is amazing you know one of the areas that we've decided to differentiate ourselves not just in the product and all the amazing things that our product guys have put in there but more of that experience to our partner right so that way they can deliver a great experience to their customer so we have decided to go what I'd consider a little bit against the grain here in the the space where more of our competitors are saying hey you're kind of on your own right you're going to automate you're kind of like self enroll self on board where we said you know what like we really want to give uh a white you know glove kind of experience to our MSP Partners so we've actually invested in specific groups of folks that will help you on board right we actually have a whole CSM team that will actually help make sure that you get the most value out of the product we've got lots of marketing support we know that msps struggle with marketing I mean candidly that's one of the areas that they are always asking for help so we have said hey like let's let's help that from marketing standpoint so we have MSP focused marketers on our team that can help uh you know provide some guidance to to msps our sales team are all um that years and years of experience in the MSP space so not only will they help ensure that the right product gets fit to the right you know need but then also uh what I would kind of like the the business Acumen piece of it is you know most of us have all kind of been in the space and we've talked to thousands of MSP so sometimes we can help say hey we thought about this from a pricing and packaging standpoint looked at this and really just trying to be more of a partner through this whole process and less of a transactional sale really putting the art back in partner if you will yes 100% yeah so speaking of your partners what kinds of partners are you looking for we did talk about msps are those the target audience here definitely our our biggest target you know and you know MSP it's such a broad term when you say MSP it could be you know all shapes and sizes and where we find that we do the best with from a a partnership from a a you know a programmatic standpoint are those partners that as I mentioned ear they're looking to kind of get to the next evolution of their business they have maybe just recently kind of scaled it up and they're not you know now trying to figure out what the next Horizon is and that's where we can really help uh we also seem to do really well with folks that are trying to be more operationally efficient right they are struggling with keeping head count maybe they're in an area where just geographically they just can't get access to good Tech Talent so they're finding other means to do that and I look at the way we provide Solutions around Ai and automation is almost an Outsourcing model but we're doing it through technology instead of uh you know other you know resources like FTE and things like that so how does goto enable Partners after they join your partner Network and how do you incentivize them to stay and grow with you so we do it a couple different ways and so one is early on when we first start that whole journey uh we bring in an onboarding support specialist to help ensure that that partner just gets every little bit of value out of the product um helping them with best practices helping them with how to actually operationalize things uh we also do that with what I'm would consider kind of thought leadership thing so can we help you with pricing and packaging can we help you with some marketing things we do a lot of work in the MDM space which is somewhat of a new area for msps and so a lot of msps are saying hey I don't really know how to tell my customer about this or to explain the value I in MSP know the value but I don't know how to make them quite understand it or get it uh and and be willing to spend more money and we can help with that you know we've got a lot of resources that we've added on specifically around that to help you'll kind of give a bit of a blueprint to help msps through this whole process and so that's kind of the early on phase when you think about how do we maintain them how do we keep them how do we really just continue to nurture this partnership for me it is really about having that true partnership and helping grow along side them as we evolve our product we take a ton of feedback from our MSP partners of saying hey like what what do you need how would you you know recommend us do the product differently or what are you challenged with can we maybe solve that through technology and so having this kind of like feedback loop to grow alongside them I think that's the really cool thing that I've seen so far is you know we've gotten the opportunity to work with some Partners when they were kind of early on in their journey and we've kind of morphed our product to fit some of their business challenges and it's really cool to see the output of hey like this is like this is a real partnership we actually doing something together which is pretty cool so can you share a success story in which a partner helped go to close an important deal with a customer yeah yeah actually uh this is one that's kind of near and dear to my heart because we got to work through this whole process together really alongside the MSP and so uh as I mentioned we um you know we we do deliver MDM as part of our core offerings and MDM is somewhat still new uh in in the space and so you know at least for msps to help consume it and try to operationalize it and so this one was was really cool in the fact that uh one of our partners had a requirement for one of their Healthcare customers to deliver upon some hipper requirements around securing devices so iPads tablets things like that again all these kind of desparate devices that are floating around and she was really struggling with how do I do it I know I need to do it can't figure out how to do it how do I still make money uh all all these things and so it was really cool to get to sit down lay out our product against the pieces of business she's trying to solve for kind of like start checking off the boxes identify the gaps we were able to help figure out some of those gaps really more on those operational things if you're going to actually roll this out to all these devices here's maybe a couple things you haven't thought of and again kind of getting back to you know some of the value we bring is that a lot of the folks on our team have been in the MSP space for a long time and we've seen some things so we could kind of help add some value around that and just give just some color commentary on things some maybe some best practices and so the end result was that our MSP partner was able to help solve all of these hippoc compliance requirements through their revenue uh in a really nice way and now they've created this nice new piece of their business that they can go out and attack other you know Healthcare customers in their in their general area and uh it's a really nice Revenue stream it's been really cool to kind of sit back and watch it now that we got it all figured out to just watch it kind of grow it's really neat seeing all that hard work pay off really exciting to hear about that and thank you for sharing that with me Tony so if there are msps or other potential Partners out there who are watching and saying I want to sign up I want to get involved I want to know more about Goto where can those interested parties go to learn more about goto and become a part of the go-to partner Network yeah so if you just hit our website just goto.com it's literally the very first thing that you see on our website now it says manage service provider and and that'll take you through the process to to get signed up for us amazing Tony thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate it yeah you got it thank you so much for having me and thank you at home for joining us for more episodes of partner POV check out channel insider.com once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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