ConnectWise Enhances Partner Program, Bets On Salesforce For Case Management

‘My priorities for my teams is to improve our speed of response, to improve our speed of resolution and to improve the quality of the resolution that we‘re providing to our partners and to have more partner engagement,’ says Geoffrey Willison, COO at ConnectWise. ‘We have continued to invest in doing the right thing for partners to have a positive experience with ConnectWise. This is another one of those matters.’

Jay Ryerse

ConnectWise is rolling out enhancements to two areas of its business to boost partner experience and uphold its promise to invest more in the partner community.

The first rollout is to expand its reach through the partner program. The second enhancement is to its case management system where the software vendor is switching to Salesforce.

The partner program, which was launched 18 months ago, was aligned to cybersecurity and to help with talent challenges MSPs were facing, said Jay Ryerse, vice president of global security sales at ConnectWise.

“They don’t have the marketing knowledge and don’t have the sales knowledge on how to talk about cybersecurity,” Ryerse told CRN. “We felt like we had the team and the people and the resources to help educate the partner community. We literally help them on what we call their partner journey.”

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And in 2023, the program will keep on maturing and refining how they work with partners including working with them on cybersecurity business plans and running marketing assessments. The program also will go beyond cybersecurity.

“We’re adding our business continuity disaster recovery backups into the program,” he said. “We’ve hired seven SMEs (subject matter experts) to help our partners go out and start to deliver a more thorough backup solution and move beyond legacy tools into current technology.”

The partner program teams also wants to host more in-person events. In 2022 they held about 80, they’re striving to do about 500 this year.

“We think that the partner program this year can expand to help any partner no matter where they are in their business,” Ryerse said. “Let’s truly build maturity, operationally and financially, and then grow their business with security and backups and other products that we offer.”

He added that partners in the program generated more than $75 million in sales for their business around cybersecurity in 2022. With the new enhancements to the program, Ryerse expects partner growth to be “hundreds of millions of dollars” this year.

“For the partners out there who are thinking about joining the ConnectWise Partner Program, I would say it’s a no brainer,” Mark Banens, owner of Miami-based MSP Bizitss. “You get money, you get resources, you get assistance whenever you need and there is a huge staff behind it.”

ConnectWise’s decision to switch to Salesforce was to consolidate multiple ticketing systems into one case management system to provide both partners and ConnectWise colleagues a better 360-view of all the different products that a partner may be using, according to Geoffrey Willison, COO at Tampa, Florida-based ConnectWise.

“Part of this move to a new internal case management system is to focus our internal developers on building the PSA for our partners use cases, not for ConnectWise use cases, which is oftentimes very different,” he told CRN. “We want to build the best PSA for our partners, not maintain it for our internal use.”

The move will allow the software vendor to respond and resolve cases faster. He said all use cases have been moved over to Salesforce and partners will be able to access logs of their previous use cases. The only changes partner may see are to the user interface.

Michael Cervino, vice president of operations at Radnor, Pa.-based MSP Circle Square Consulting, said he is glad to see that they are improving and added that Salesforce is a “better product than ConnectWise in what they’re trying to do.”

“Salesforce is a great product,” he told CRN. “In my experience there are certain issues, especially when reaching out to partner success teams, where the experience is not good. If they can leverage better technology and automation to solve my escalations better, than I am 100 percent on board.”

One of the reasons for the switch was ConnectWise’s promise to partners to be easier to do business with. The rollout will take place on January 14.

“My priorities for my teams is to improve our speed of response, to improve our speed of resolution, to improve the quality of the resolution that we‘re providing to our partners and to have more partner engagement,” Willison said. “We have continued to invest in doing the right thing for partners to have a positive experience with ConnectWise. This is another one of those matters.”