Top Gun 51 Profile: Trustwave’s Suzanne Swanson on Growing Partner Relationships to Build Success
… have an integrated approach in the channel. The average customer now has 26 individual security companies they work with in an enterprise. And we’ve seen customers who have even more. The challenge for the customer is integrating it all. What Trustwave does is to help our customers deal with this. What we’re doing from a direct sales standpoint is making sure we have sales representatives who are trained for the breadth of cybersecurity so they can help customers better know their own needs.
CF: How did you end up working in the channel?
SS: I was attending the University of Kansas and I was waiting on tables in a restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. One day I had customers from Pioneer Standard, a hardware distributor. They were a couple senior managers. They handed me their cards and they mentioned that they were hiring a new sales representative. I got an interview, made the cut and then had to make a presentation on why I was the best fit. I got the job. At Pioneer, I was an inside sales representative. I had started at school as a computer science major, but I ended up in sociology.
CF: What’s your philosophy about working with channel partners?
SS: I just love working with partners, including the fact that it tends to be a mutually beneficial relationship and that you tend to get to know each other and work with each other closely. I really like that. With customer relationships, they have their agenda, and the sales representative has their own agenda. With partner relationships, you’re able to more closely align those agendas. Another piece I figured out quickly is that on my own, I could only go out and talk to X number of customers by myself. But if I had a partner, I could talk to 10 times as many customers. That showed me the value of having partners.
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