From embracing remote working to the trial of the four-day working week, companies all around the UK are assessing how they can implement refreshed working practices promising productivity and efficiency gains galore.
These benefits are at the centre of what software vendor monday.com aims to bring with its workplace OS solution, described as “a platform built for a new way of working”. The company launched in Tel Aviv in 2014, and has since opened offices in Australia, the US and, as of last year, the UK.
Investing heavily in London as its European headquarters, monday.com is planning to recruit up to 90 employees in the UK by the end of 2022. Currently it has over 15,000 UK customers and seven UK channel partners — a number the company is aiming to expand to around 12 in the coming months, regional director EMEA Naveed Malik told Comms Business.
Malik has been in the Channel business for around 17 years and in the tech industry for 25, bringing previous experience from roles at IBM, Logicalis, NetApp, Dropbox and Splunk to name a few.
“My focus, the bulk of the time I was in tech sales, was around how can I be more productive?,” Malik said. “How can I get more out of the time that I have with my customers, or just generally [be] getting more ARR and selling more hardware? Partners were a really good way of being able to do that.”
Uniqueness
He believes that for monday.com, there’s uniqueness to be found in both the flexibility of its platform and the way that the company works with partners.
“With monday.com you work out what your workflow is and you create that [on the platform]. It tailors itself to pretty much anything you need it to be and that’s why we call it a Work OS,” he explained.
“That’s why we’ve got lots of areas like CRM, device management, software development. You can bring all of those together and you can also bring data in from different sources and present it in a single surface. You’re working from within that single surface, for a really efficient and productive way of working.”
The concept has allowed the company to really drive technology relationships with other vendors, he pointed out, something he described as powerful and unique.
“We’re not out to capture as many partners as we possibly can. What we’re really looking for is … partners who want to build a profitable business, want to help us build market share in the countries that we operate in, and are interested in creating new solutions through monday.com,” Malik said.
“There’s a lot of interest around monday.com and who we are, what we do, some people see it as a one-off transaction, something they can get in very quick and easy … Because we’re focused on building a business, we don’t necessarily need to go down that route. A lot of partners, where they are committed and they want to build a business, they’re much more structured in the way they go about it.”
Partnerships
The biggest signal for Malik when determining whether to work with a partner is when they invest in activating and enabling their team, he said.
“That’s the thing that really is a game changer … making sure that the people who are actually doing the role are also supported by their business as well and that makes a huge, huge difference. We’re very up front about that right at the beginning.”
Additionally, partners should prove their value by having an honest discussion with customers about where they’ve delivered value already and demonstrate how that could be improved on in order to expand, he added.
“The whole rip and replace thing, ‘you don’t need that anymore, you need this’ — customers don’t want that. They’re saying, ‘I’ve put a three- or five-year investment into this platform, how can I get more from it, how can I sweat that asset better?”
His advice to resellers and MSPs around building meaningful channel partnerships? Make sure you’re creating a realistic plan.
“I can’t emphasis the word‘realistic’enough,” Malik said. “There are things that a vendor wants you to do, and there are things that you are able to do and capable of delivering. It’s being able to push back and saying actually, this is where we think we will really perform.
“But it’s also incumbent on a vendor to say, here’s an area I think we can really develop and grow, to be able to articulate what a really good value prop looks like and how they can build together.”