Discuss — ever seen anything like what’s happening in the channel?
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Who is Mark Palomba and what’s his back story?
Long standing Citrix Platinum partner - The time, money and resources required to be a partner of any significance is immense. You have to employ sales who are trained in Citrix, you have to employ a technical bench to support the product, you have certifications that have to be paid for and renewed every three years times multiple people required for the Specializations, you have marketing costs and you need operational people in multiple departments who are trained on all the Citrix portals, sites, and ever changing processes and procedures. This is necessary if you stand to make any kind of decent margin from selling their product. If you accomplish all of that, you have to jump through numerous hoops to ensure you actually get paid on their incentives and/or re-reimbursed on marketing funding. Once you bring them new customers, you have to make sure your sales reps are always three steps ahead of their sales reps in order to get approved for incentives. Additionally, you have to form strong relationships with their sales team in the hopes that they won't turn around and take orders direct. Unfortunately, even if you have strong relationships with Citrix sales reps, their leadership will often discourage them from granting incentives and in many cases urge them to take deals direct with the customer. From there you need to have a team who is on top of any quarterly rebates because they will very often make mistakes that are not corrected unless you point them out but even after doing so you need to expect to wait at least another quarter before they correct their mistake. - We have all heard for a number of years that Citrix wants to "re-invigorate the Channel" and that they are a "Channel first organization" and yet their relationships with the partner community keeps getting worse and they keep putting clueless people in leadership roles at Citrix Channel. We thought last year was bad but current "leadership" is by far the worst in the 20+ years we've worked with Citrix. Their competitors understand the importance of the Channel, they pay far better and they are so much easier to work with. There's no business logic in backing Citrix any longer.
Partners have come to this site to say they are treated like sh-t by Citrix. Citrix doesn’t give partners incentives like other companies. Many people have told leadership that we need to step it up but they don’t care. Partners feel lied too. Citrix has a product that doesn’t matter in a pandemic.