Addeo wants the direct and channel sales forces to work more effectively together, and also wants to expand their channel presence beyond MSPs.
John Addeo, Netsurion’s CRO
Today, XDR provider Netsurion has announced the appointment of John Addeo as their new Chief Revenue Officer. Addeo takes the job with extensive experience on both the channel and enterprise sales of business, most recently as Rapid7’s channel director. Netsurion has both Go-to-Market approaches, with a channel built around MSPs and a direct sales force. Addeo believes that they have not been well coordinated, however. He also thinks that the channel would benefit by being more diverse, and adding in different partner types. All of this is just at the inception stage, but the plan is to build it all out going forward.
“It’s coming together,” Addeo said. “It’s a journey and a work in progress. I’m still at the stage of looking at the business. We have a sales organization and a channel sales organization that is focused on MSSPs – as we go forward those worlds have to blend and we also have to look at solution providers and SIs. My job is to bring all of that together.”
Addeo said that the attractiveness for him in coming to Netsurion was this ability to build out both worlds.
“I have a channel background but also come from the sales world – mainly in cybsersecurity and network security,” he stated. “This lets me look at the strategy across both streams, and the revenue across both streams.”
Netsurion revamped its channel program only a year ago, but Addeo said changes will need to be made to drive the sales channels in the direction that he envisions.
“We are going to have to rework the channel program,” he stated. “We have to meet our customers where they are. They are asking for support from their partners. In some cases, it’s MSP and MSSPs – and in same cases they want us to guide them directly. We need to get involved in and work with those who are not currently represented, such as VARS and solution providers – and then its about bringing those channels together so we have an effective engagement plan, with new types of partners.”
Addeo said that systems integrators are a primary target.
“My job is to ensure that we are working with the right ones,” he indicated. “We won’t be everything to everybody. All of that is under review.”
Netsurion has historically focused on the midmarket, and while that will continue to be their area of strength, Addeo emphasized that the new strategy will make them more flexible.
“The midmarket has been priced out of the space and has a hard time retaining talent,” he said. “However, we want to focus the teams on the customer need. To me, it’s less about the segment or the size and more about the need. We service organizations who are having a hard time with skills and building out a Security operation. We scale from the midmarket to the low enterprise, but we can scale up or down. Customer needs is really what we are looking at.”
