Freshworks eyes 50/50 channel sales in A/NZ

India-founded software vendor Freshworks is doubling down its channel play in Australia and Zealand as it aims for 50 per cent partner sales in the next two years.

Speaking to ARN, channel sales lead Amr Farghali revealed that the local channel team is onboarding partners on a monthly basis, growing its current fleet of 20.

“We’re looking at scaling [the channel] up and doubling it in the very near future,” Farghali said. “We also want to on board the right set of partners.

“It’s as much about quality as quantity. I’m not for getting in as many partners as possible to scale. It’s about being selective and finding committed and invested partners who would come on the journey with us, as opposed to those here for the short term.”

Headquartered in the United States, Freshworks provides a number of cloud-based offerings, including customer support product FreshDesk, messaging platform FreshChat and customer relationship management (CRM) software FreshSales.

Farghali joined the company last year, moving on from his role as cloud sales and alliances lead at Virtusa. He has also spent two years as a partner sales lead for Contino and two years at Salesforce during his IT career.

He is now tasked with growing and scaling Freshworks’ partner footprint across Australia and New Zealand and also with rolling out its new global partner program.

Speaking about the new program, Farghali said: “We wanted to build simplification into the process end to end. We wanted to make everything clear between tiers and how partners are incentivised and certified.

“We have got about 500 resellers or solution partners across the world and about 300 ISVs and about 1100 technology applications built on our specific partner interface. There are a lot of partners growing with us.”

Local opportunities he envisages for A/NZ partners include public sector, financial services and even telecommunications.

Discussing the main partner attributes he seeks, Farghali said. “Freshworks is a platform that is growing at a rapid rate. We specialise in three different segments: customer service, IT service management and customer relationship management (CRM). I’m looking to invest in partners who have capabilities in either of those pillars or all of them. All of them is hard to come by.”

“Those who go deep into those areas are what we look for, especially those who complement these with industry strengths.

Among its 20 A/NZ partners are Synergy Enterprise Solutions, which has bases in Sydney, Melbourne Christchurch, and Gosford-based independent software vendor OneBlink.

“It’s about finding the perfect intersect between product and industry specialisations,” Farghali added.

With its platform natively built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), partners who are well-versed in that cloud ecosystem are especially sought after.

Indeed, Farghali said the company has found a “lot of appeal and interest” in specific AWS solutions and sales play from partners, key attributes for building a strong customer pipeline in the public and private sectors.

Partners in A/NZ  will no doubt become familiar with Farghali on a regular basis as he seeks to build more face-to-face time with partners across both sides of the Tasman.

“The main thing for us now that things have opened up again is just to seize the opportunities,” he said. “One of which is top go out and see our partners face to face, and really understand where they are; what are they doing and how can we support them.”