Bigger, Faster … Better? Under Magee, ConnectWise Looks to Maintain Dominance in a Channel It Helped Build
… the speed of change, and that means being faster to service, faster to address problems and faster to produce results—all while keeping the platform as simple and streamlined as possible. It’s a tall order.
Everyone knows the theory that says there are three key elements of a successful project: good, fast and cheap. The trick is that in reality, most of the time you can only have at most two of those three elements.
It’s clear that the massive Thoma Bravo investment – undisclosed, but widely assumed to be around the $1B mark – has rendered the “cheap” element somewhat irrelevant, but Magee is determined to nail both the “good” and “fast” bits.
Partners First — Always
Longtime ConnectWise employee Craig Fulton took on the newly created role of Chief Customer Officer early this year, more evidence of this heavy partner focus. Fulton’s concentration, though, isn’t on customer support, but on customer success, which says Fulton, is about building loyalty. It’s ensuring partners are getting the most they can out of products and services. It’s about nailing down what “success” means to that customer and helping them drive toward that goal. It’s an extremely ambiguous and ambitious objective considering the sheer number of ConnectWise partners, similar to business development but on a much bigger scale.
“That’s when it gets really tricky, because everyone’s idea of success is different,” Fulton laughs.
The company has a rich resource to help them coach their partners in business evolution. In early 2018, it bought HTG Peer Groups, the brainchild of channel stalwart Arlin Sorensen.
Sorensen is one of the few channel luminaries who can claim a career as long and influential as Arnie Bellini’s; he started his MSP, Heartland Technology Solutions, in 1985, and through HTG, founded in 2000, he’s been coaching channel partners on how to achieve business and personal goals for nearly two decades. HTG, renamed IT Nation Evolve after the ConnectWise acquisition, places emphasis on areas like succession planning, work-life balance and building for acquisition.
Fulton keeps scorecards for ConnectWise partners that measure …