Bringing Excellence to Our Partner Community

Each year, CRN recognizes the women making a significant impact on the IT channel today with its Women of the Channel Awards. The annual list includes the top female leaders of the IT channel and honors professionals whose expertise and insight help drive channel success within their organizations.

The Women of the Channel Awards brings focus to women who are driving growth and innovation in the technology industry and, more specifically, the channel. CRN’s initiative to spotlight exceptional women paves an important path and demonstrates to all female professionals that there are other women in this space who have accomplished great things. It encourages women to strive for leadership positions and to pursue roles and projects that perhaps they felt were beyond their experience level.

I am thrilled to be named one of CRN’s Women of the Channel for the second year in a row. It’s very exciting to be recognized as a woman in a historically male-led industry, and I appreciate that CRN is continuing to celebrate women for their leadership and strategic vision.

A successful channel program is founded on the understanding that we, as an organization, have a responsibility to prove ourselves to partners as much as we do to customers. We have to efficiently and effectively establish who we are, the problems we solve, and the value we bring so that partners are excited about our technology and want to be the first thought leaders to share it with their customers.

The quickest way to accomplish this is to bring our partners into new opportunities and do so as early in the process as possible. With this approach, our partners experience the sales cycle with us and learn along the way. They can better understand the use cases that are important to their customers, hear the questions their customers ask, and see the kinds of high-value/high-impact threats we find during our risk assessment.

From there, we offer resources and guidance that enable partners to confidently discuss Abnormal’s benefits and differentiators with their customers. We ensure they have the information they need to educate their customers about the Abnormal solution to a complex, costly problem that many of their customers didn’t know there was an effective way to solve. In short, our channel-first strategy supports our partners throughout the entire sales cycle.

A partner recently told me, “Any time we bring Abnormal's solution to our customers, it brings us credibility.” What this means is we’ve done what we’ve said we’re going to do by proving the value and efficacy of the solution. We’ve shown how we operate and collaborate with our partners, and how we are obsessive about customer success. It’s proof of both our go-to-market strategy and our mindset when it comes to the partner relationship.

Abnormal has experienced (and continues to experience) unprecedented growth—something that wouldn’t be possible without our channel partners. They are crucial to the success of our company because they help us not just evangelize our message but also solve the $2.4+ billion per year business email compromise (BEC) problem.

What I love most about women in tech communities (and the women in channel community in particular) is that everyone is there to support one another. I’ve met women in channel at other companies, and everyone is willing to be a sounding board and offer assistance however they can. The universal attitude is, “Let’s lock arms and help each other. I’m here if you have questions and feel free to bounce ideas off me. Tell me if I can help you in any way.”

I see this with women in IT in general, but I see it even more so with women in channel. It feels like a true community—a place you can go to for support, advice, and mentorship. The women in channel network connects female professionals with one another and helps them find different ways to work together to support the same cause, which is bringing excellence to our partner community.

To learn more about CRN’s 2022 Women of the Channel Awards, read our press release!