Having rebranded from LogMeIn and launched a new partner program that unites what had been three separate ones that came through acquisition, GoTo plans to rework its channel to build deeper relationships than the more transactional ones of the past.
Michael Day, Vice President of Partner Sales, GoTo
Today, Michael Day, whose appointment as Vice President of Partner Sales at GoTo was announced earlier this week, officially takes over as channel leader. GoTo, formerly known as LogMeIn, was recently rebranded to better reflect its core product lines.
This is Day’s first formal day on the job at GoTo, coming from RingCentral, where he spent five years, most recently as Regional VP of Global Partner Sales.
“I reported to the Global Chief running partner sales organizations in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe,” Day said. “It was a great experience there. It gave me all the tools to be successful in my broader role here as Vice President of Partner Sales.”
Day’s role was created because GoTo is spinning off their LastPass password management solution into a separate company. The channel chief at the combined company, Patrick McCue, is moving to LastPass to run channels there.
“They wanted a separate channel leader for each company,” Day said. “LastPass is such as outstanding technology that we knew it had to be separate. Patrick [who was at identity vendor Okta before coming to LogMeIn/GoTo], has a strong background in security.” All the integrations between LastPass and GoTo will remain, and the intent is to strengthen them further going forward.
GoTo recently consolidated its product portfolio, which has had the impact of making some well-known products like GoTo Meeting less visible than before, even though they are still there. Everything has been consolidated into two flagship products, GoTo Resolve, and GoTo Connect, the latter of which now contains the meeting solutions. The idea here was to better invest in business cases, especially SMB use cases, and take advantage of the portfolio’s strength in being able to present well to other businesses.
The SMB is thus GoTo’s primary focus today, although not their only one.
“We are happy to solve problems for customers of all shapes and sizes, but in the past two years of the pandemic, we believe that the SMB has been overlooked as companies looked to design solutions for the enterprise,” Day said. “We know that the core products of Connect and Resolve fit there. In addition, as you solve problems for the SMB, it does get you to the enterprise, which has similar problems, which are just bigger in scale.”
The new partner program unifies multiple separate programs which had existed before and came through acquisitions – LogMeIn, Jive and Remote Solutions Group. Now it is one program with multiple tracks.
“The multiple technologies that made up the separate programs in the past all had uniqueness in their programs – some of which was good, and some of which was bad,” Day said. “Aside from fixing that, we also want to get rid of the concept of being just a channel program. We want to move from transactional relationships to true partnerships across all of these technologies.”
GoTo has over 4000 active channel partners globally.
“The Partner Managers are key for us in managing them, and we will ensure that they have at their disposal what they need,” Day said. “We will try to perfect what we can control to build two-way relationships – not one-way transactional ones.”
The partner tiers have now been formalized and standardized, which they were not in the three separate programs.
“The training and enablement also has me very excited,” Day said. “We want partners to feel that if they invest time with GoTo, they will be able to see intrinsic value – maybe to the point where we become their communications system.”
Day said that the next big milestone will be Day One at GoTo for him, which is today.
“Channel partners will have an opportunity to reconnect, and many of them I have known for years,” he stated. “I’m just wearing a different name tag now. We will figure out how to better the partner community with the techs at their disposal.”
Day also said that they are really looking forward to getting back doing events live with partners, rather than with Internet telephony.
“We are excited for the ability to get back and do things live and in person, something that so many of us missed,” he said. “Any type of live event has to be built on networking and relationships.”
