Each year, CRN, a brand of the Channel Company, releases a list of leading IT channel vendor executives who continually demonstrate outstanding leadership, influence, innovation, and growth — i.e. CRN Channel Chiefs.
StorMagic is thrilled to announce that our CRO and Board Member, Brian Grainger, was included in this year’s list. To celebrate this achievement, we sat down with Brian to ask him a few questions about his involvement in the channel and what StorMagic is doing to support its partners through its channel program.
Tell us about your background in the channel.
I’ve been working in IT for over 25 years now, and for the most part, have primarily worked with channel partners worldwide. Within current and past roles, my responsibilities have involved building a channel program from the ground up, expanding products, and growing channel partners across 70+ countries. My career originally began with me working for a VAR, and I’ve spent many years after that working with various distribution partners.
Why does StorMagic follow a 100% channel revenue business model?
I started at StorMagic in January of 2019, running global sales. One of my initial priorities was to move the company to a 100% channel model, across all countries. This decision was primarily driven by our customers’ solution selection and procurement. In many cases, StorMagic is a piece of an overall solution. Therefore, it made sense to team up with our VAR community and help each other win business, versus us sitting alone on the outside and trying to deliver results on our own. There’s an “it takes a village” mentality instilled within our sales and technical services team.
What were StorMagic’s top channel accomplishments in 2020?
While we had many channel accomplishments to celebrate in 2020, there are two at the top of my list… 1) We expanded our distribution business across all three major regions (Americas / EMEA / APJ), providing our VAR community with a wider range of options (per their request), and 2) we revamped our entire Channel Program and Partner Portal, providing remote learning, as well as lead generation and sales tools, to better help our partners learn about our product portfolio.
What will StorMagic be doing for its channel partners in 2021?
Over the past nine months, we’ve increased our product set three-fold and introduced a new MSP / MSSP program, designed specifically for those “service provider” types of partner sales models. I have, and plan to continue, adding significantly more Channel Sales Representative (CSR) resources to our team, to provide sales support and joint lead generation programs / campaigns to their local partners.
What have you enjoyed most about managing the channel over the lifetime of your career?
I’ve enjoyed being able to help our channel partners navigate through the fast paced advancements of modern day technologies, and adapting my own business to address their evolving sales and marketing models. I generally believe that whatever organization I’m managing should need to make adjustments, versus requiring a channel to adapt to me. Examples include cloud infrastructure in the early to mid-2000’s, subscription-based products in the later 2000’s, and most recently, the change in go-to-market since the pandemic hit in Q1 of 2020. When my company is part of a channel partner’s success, I view that as a major win.
CRN’s 2021 Channel Chiefs list will be featured in the February 2021 issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/ChannelChiefs.
To learn more about the StorMagic Channel Program and the benefits of partnering with us, visit our website. To sign up for the StorMagic Partner Portal and gain access to an assortment of helpful resources and tools to help you succeed out in the field, click here.
