“That goes for not only from people like myself who are out facing directly with partners, but partner program managers and partner certification teams,” he added.

Within the APJ region, Sillars said its local team is up to 20, up from roughly six in 2024, and plans to “significantly” expand this further.

“You go through a process of frog kissing when you start to go and work out who are our channel partners, who’s capable, who cares, and who’s going to make a difference,” he said.

Sillars added the vendor decided to take on a two-tier distribution model in every country it operates, which is roughly 15 countries in APAC – including A/NZ.

In Goldsmith’s view, when he and Sillars both came on board in mid-2024, Semperis didn’t have a solid distribution partner in region, but a mix of distribution and direct partners, which he said was “all over the place”.

“We really wanted to standardise, not only in Australia and New Zealand, but across the region,” he said. So, we onboarded Nextgen Connect for across for Australia and New Zealand. That happened in November last year.

“We’re working very closely with Nextgen Connect to take our solution to partners to start building out that partner ecosystem, leverage their expertise around not only the partners that they work with and who they’re selling to and who’s selling what, but also their internal systems to give us that intent data around where we need to be talking and who we need to be talking to.”

Incentivising partner success

With the vendor claiming to be a 100 per cent channel business, Semperis chief revenue officer Mike DeGaetano said the company is putting its money where its mouth is with its sales team being incentivised for making deals through partners.

“There is no conflict for them to say, ‘Oh no, I don’t need the channel. I don’t need a partner on this deal. I’m going to go try to take it direct,’” he said. “That would be silly for them to do. We’re at a point in the program where that never happens anymore.”

DeGaetano continued, saying his sales team is split into two sides – sales and partner representatives.

“Lincoln’s job is to go win mindshare in those partners; … I lean on him to tell us who are the partners that we should be working with,” he said. “If he’s putting in all this time and effort into a fixed amount of partners—because you can’t be everywhere—I want my sales team spending their time with the partners that he’s working with.

“What we do is we give them an incentive. The way that our program has evolved is they make even more commission if they work with our focus partners; the partners that he’s working with.”

In the short term, DeGaetano said he plans to push the percentage of business done through partners up from 30 per cent to 50 per cent by the end of its next fiscal year.

“That’s one of the reasons why we’ve enhanced the Focus partner program to win more partner loyalty,” he added.

“A lot of other companies I’ve spoken to and worked at, the goal was always one third from sales, one third from marketing, one third from channel. I’ve already accomplished the one third; I want to go way beyond that.”