Netrio has just announced the appointment of Bobby Hall as Vice President of Channel Sales. This further strengthens the company’s sales leadership team and advances its mission to drive organic growth through partners. In his new role, Hall will be responsible for expanding and executing Netrio’s channel strategy, leading channel sales operations, and expanding the company’s footprint within the mid-market and enterprise segments. Hall brings more than 25 years of sales and channel leadership experience to the role, with a proven track record of building high-performing teams and accelerating partner-driven revenue. Most recently, he served as Channel Chief at ConnexAI, where he successfully launched the company and established its partner program. Prior to that, he held senior leadership positions as Channel Chief at LiveVox and Head of North America Channel Sales at 8×8. Earlier in his career, Hall served in sales roles at CenturyLink, Unify, Arrow Systems Integration, Shoretel, and Avaya.
Hall reports directly to Mike Cromwell, Chief Revenue Officer at Netrio. Cromwell originally designed the partner program and the Netrio Go-to-Market plan, and Cromwell indicated the two men will share responsibility for management of channel operations going forward, including development of new incentive programs, expanding channel head count to new regions, and investing in the implementation of Netrio partners.
“I now have Bobby to lead that program and execute it,” Cromwell told ChannelBuzz. “And it will be Bobby designing it with me. So it will be a co-design. I built this from the get-go, and as we grow, it was time for me to bring in somebody who could help us scale it to the next level. So it will be the two of us building it, but it will be Bobby’s initial design, and then I’ll help him tweak it.”
Since Netrio launched its Channel Partner program as the industry’s first within the Technology Solution Distributors (TSDs) in 2017, partners have played a critical role in the company’s growth strategy. Channel partners are being increasingly engaged by mid-market and enterprise IT executives as their trusted advisors to help them navigate the increasing complexity of both advancing strategic initiatives while continuing to deliver services to their end users.
Growing the program with solid channel partners is a key priority for Netrio.
“We are headquartered in the U.S. and our focus until now has been on customers with headquarters in the U.S., but outside the US is in our Go Forward plans,” Cromwell commented. “We do service customers that have a global presence and global locations. So we, while we have to date, have focused on customers based in the US, we have customers that have locations and people all over the globe. Our services stack is built to support a global organization. Then with some of the services, you have to set up regulated organizations overseas in certain locations. So we haven’t gone down the path to do that until we’re ready to expand our sales presence outside of the US. But we have global presence. We have locations outside of the US, in Belfast, Ireland, as well as Pune, India and our plans are certainly to expand geographically.
‘So far we have only a handful of people in Canada,” Cromwell noted. “However, we haven’t had explicit focus on selling into Canada. We just recently acquired a company that’s headquartered in Buffalo, New York, so we’ve been socializing expansion into Toronto, because it’s fairly close. But to date, we haven’t yet serviced end user clients in Canada. Now we have customers that have locations in Canada that that we can support their employees, and that’s certainly something that we’ll be talking about in terms of expansion. We expect that will be a great market for us.”
Cromwell said that Netrio has been growing at a pretty solid growth rate – both organically and through M&As.
“We’re also seizing an opportunity to work with the channel to drive adoption of sales of managed services and managed security, with channel partners,” he indicated.
“The catalyst in bringing Bobby in is that we’re expanding head count dramatically. So up to this point, we’ve had no more than three channel managers servicing all North America,” Cromwell stated. “Our near-term plans are to triple that and so we’re going to be hiring people to cover all the regions in the US. And we’re also going to be investing more in channel enablement programs for training, learning and education, and thought leadership programs for the end user clients and customers. We are investing in marketing materials for our partners to help them evangelize managed services and managed security into their client bases. And then another thing we’re really excited about is that this year, through one of our acquisitions, we acquired a platform, a service management platform that we think is the best we’ve seen in the business, called NetrioNow [AgioNow before its rebranding], and it’s a proprietary AI-enabled platform that, among other things, is going to enable us to offer white label MSP and MSSP services through to channel partners. This is for smaller MSPs and VARs that want to extend into selling services. And even for that matter, the channel partners that have a more of a traditional agency, they want to make the pivot to selling services on their own brand. So you know, it’s going to be a big transformation and growth of our channel organization that Bobby will be overseeing.”
Cromwell said that leveraging Technology Solutions Distributors like Avant, Polaris, Intelisys, Bridgepointe, and AppDirect is a key part of Netrio’s Go-to-Market strategy,
“We predominantly sell through the technology solution distributors, and the strategy in terms of how we work with those TSDs is about making sure that we’re positioning our engineering teams with their engineering teams, and our creation teams, with their creation teams, ensuring that our marketing teams are aligned so that we’re providing them the most recent and relevant marketing content. We are really making sure that we’re staying connected with them and also collaborating with them on a lot of the education programs the TSDs are doing for their partners, so we’ll leverage our marketing development funds to participate. It’s us doing a combination of things. It’s training, it’s evangelizing about what we do and what’s happening in the managed services space. But it’s also helping the partners identify the right opportunities that might be a fit for us. It’s helping them throughout the sales process or the buyer’s journey. So our channel people will get heavily engaged in the process. If the partner wants us to where we’ll help them qualify an opportunity, we’ll help them do the design, the proposal, and bring it all the way through to lifecycle management, all the way through to keeping the partner engaged, as we expand our opportunities within the client. Companies that work with TSDs get access to a wealth of content they’ve got, and different types of tools that they can use, and that gives them scale. It gives them capabilities that they probably wouldn’t otherwise have on their own and so, so we like to align with them, because it helps them attract partners that are targeting midmarket and enterprise clients, which is where our target is.”
Cromwell said that Netrio has over 300 actively engaged partners that roll up to those TSDs.
“We expect that number to grow dramatically over the course of the next year,” he stated. That’s in the context of the Omdia MSP Trends and Predictions 2025 report, which forecasts that managed services revenue delivered through the channel will grow about 13% year-over-year in 2025, climbing to roughly $595 billion globally.
Cromwell said Netrio serves a broad client base among all three segments.
“We necessarily have SMB clients, we’ve got midmarket, and we’ve got the lower end of the enterprise segment,” he indicated. “I’d say where we do really well, if we were to look at the kind of breakdown of revenue and kind of concentration, we’re more heavily weighted towards midmarket and enterprise. Now, certain acquisitions that we’ve done have more of a concentration of SMBs. So, for example, we acquire a company based in Minneapolis and Buffalo, both had heavy concentrations of SMBs in those local markets. And we’re continuing to have that focus, so in those markets where we had a heavy concentration of SMBs, we’ll maintain that. But going forward, especially through the channel, the channel is heavily focused on midmarket or midmarket enterprise, and that’s where our focus is aligned.
‘Over time, you want to refine and put your investment into the partners that are going to be really engaged and they’re very tightly aligned to the market that you’re going to serve well, because at the end of the day, we want to be able to work with partners who are going to help us deliver a great experience to their client,” Cromwell continued. “But it’s still fairly early stage in terms of adoption of channel partners selling those managed IT services and managed security services, as we recruit and bring on board new partners. There’s a kind of a natural vetting process over time. So you have to cast a wide net to understand which partners are going to be aligned, and understand who the right partners are that you’re going to work with. So certainly we can talk about what are the characteristics of the right partner, but we’ve really got to understand who’s their target client base, and what kind of sales, support resources do they bring to the table? What’s their appetite to learn and sell additional services? And so certainly we want to grow the number, but we want to do it the right way, and we want to help the right partners that are focused on the right segments where we’re going to do well, because we don’t want to get aligned with partners who sell into a segment that doesn’t align with us, nor do we want to align with somebody who’s not going to be engaged in the process to help us deliver a great experience. So it’s going to be growth, but it’s going to be the right kind of growth. I’ll tell you this, if a partner wants to engage us on a deal a year, I’m okay with that. So I’m never going to be of the mindset that, hey, we have got to eliminate partners, because they’re only going to bring us one deal a year, but if we close one deal a year, I’m happy as could be with that. We certainly would love to have partners that bring us a deal every month, but we are still going to be growing.”