Egnyte Taps Jeff Nollette to Lead Sales, Channel Transformation

How do you effectively transition a direct company into a channel company in the least amount of time? Egnyte has hired industry and channel veteran Jeff Nollette to help lead the way for the Mountain View, Calif.-based enterprise file sharing company. Nollette’s top priority is aligning Egnyte’s field reps and sales leadership to put the channel first. One of the top incentives is priority leads to partners. Here are the details.

First, some background. If Nollette’s name is familiar it’s probably because he’s spent 25 years in the industry, most recently with EMC. He joined EMC as part of that company’s Isilon acquisition in November 2010. Nollette’s specialty over the course of his career has focused on helping companies transition from mostly direct sales to mostly channel sales.

“Egnyte right now is in a transformational stage,” Nollette told MSPmentor. “We’ve been a direct business since our inception, and we are working to change that to gain scale and leverage.”

Nollette’s first day on the job was only about 10 days ago, but Egnyte’s channel efforts “in earnest” are about five months old, he said. The company has already put in place a formal channel program with two tiers, Elite and Associate. Benefits include everything from discounts to resources to funding. Nollette said that the company has got all the standard building blocks in place around training and enablement, support and infrastructure.

“We are moving to the channel,” he said. “To pull that off we’ve got to make sure we are all rowing in the same direction with sales reps and sales leadership.”

NetApp’s transition

And Nollette has achieved this before. He points to his experience at Network Appliance (now NetApp) back in 1998. The company’s revenues were $166 million then with $20 million from the channel — a small percentage. Nollette said that within 4 to 5 years 50 percent of those revenues were coming from the channel. When he left the company at the end of 2008, more than 60 percent of revenues were from the channel.

To achieve that kind of success in moving to channel sales “you need to put the right building blocks in place and make it non-threatening for sales reps.”

The job is somewhat easier at Egnyte because the company is smaller and more nimble at this point than some of the other companies where Nollette succeeded with channel transitions.

“The challenges at Egnyte I see as minor. We’ve got a sales organization that isn’t overwhelmingly large.” In addition, senior leadership is on board with the channel transition, he said.

What partners can expect

So what can partners expect from Nollette’s initiatives?

He’s promising sales training that he calls experiential. That includes client meetings with sales reps experienced in Egnyte’s offerings so that partners can see and learn things like how objections are handled. And before reps can win advanced accreditation, Egnyte will want to see them deliver a compelling presentation to a client.

Benefits for this type of advanced accreditation will include priority lead distribution. It may even include a look into Egnyte’s book of business and the transitioning of revenue run rate accounts, Nollette told me. “It’s what all sales reps are looking for – free money if they can pick up the ball and run with it.”

Here are a few more details of Egnyte’s updated partner program straight from the company’s documents: