Since our earliest days as a company, partners have been foundational to our success. Together, we disrupted the firewall market and now we have the opportunity to redefine what it means to be secure in the hybrid workforce world. The need to access applications anytime, anywhere represents a massive growth opportunity. To capitalize on this market inflection, we have made a company-wide commitment to invest in, grow with and optimize for our partners. Today’s unveiling of our new partner compensation model is the crescendo.
This new model broadens and boosts our partner incentive strategy, providing a balanced approach that rewards both partners and partner personnel for the value they deliver to our customers on a per-deal basis. We are making profitability more predictable, so our partners can make better business decisions. As a result, we are strengthening our most sustainable competitive advantage – our partners.
We saw this breakaway opportunity and started building the blueprint for future partner success over 2 years ago. We have spent the past 10 months transforming our award-winning NextWave Partner Program by introducing a new framework and streamlining requirements. Now, we’re enhancing partner profitability with new back-end rebates and rewarding individual partner sales representatives. We’re delivering on our promise to evolve the NextWave program with the most comprehensive set of enhancements in our company’s history.
Back-End Rebates
Our move toward back-end rebates will be game-changing. It shifts the entire competitive landscape, allowing us to breakaway from the competition as we reward partners for the value they deliver on a per-deal basis. Our partners want to build a Palo Alto Networks security practice and have predictable ways to earn, which is key when making critical business decisions. Moving to back-end rebates will allow for this predictability, incentivize desired partner behaviors to enhance profitability, and open the door for partner managers to discuss investing in Palo Alto Networks. The introduction of additional back-end rebates makes this a win for both us and our partners.
Historically, Palo Alto Networks has had NextWave rebates, but only for a small subset of partners. Effective immediately, this new compensation model will have three different types of rebates:
- Expertise – Rewards specialized or proficient partners for closing deal-registered or deal-submitted opportunities in their area of expertise.
- Opportunity – Rewards NextWave partners for delivering a specific/defined value on eligible opportunities.
- Accelerate – Rewards Distributors for helping Innovator and Registered partners accelerate the adoption of Palo Alto Networks products and services.
For expertise rebates, all NextWave Solution Providers and MSSPs in good standing with one or more corresponding specializations or proficiencies qualify, regardless of level. For opportunity rebates, Registered partners (Solution Provider and MSSP Paths) do not qualify, and for accelerate rebates, NextWave Authorized Distributors qualify if they are in good standing.
Partner Perks Sales Rewards Incentive
We continuously evaluate and monitor the success of our NextWave program by listening, learning and acting on partner feedback. Last year, we heard loud and clear that we needed to simplify and streamline the number of incentives we were running globally.
Our Partner Perks sales rewards incentive addresses competitive gaps based on our peer analysis and offers a consistent, ongoing programmatic incentive. This new, tiered points partner sales incentive is open to NextWave Partners worldwide, and it is not time-limited. Partner Perks rewards partner sales representatives with NextWave Rewards Points based on eligible product and deal size opportunities, including a new customer bonus for deal registered and deal submitted opportunities that are close-won. This new incentive allows us to reward individuals, not just the company.
Partner sales representatives can participate in Partner Perks starting today (October 2, 2023). Once an eligible deal is closed, the partner sales representatives will be alerted to submit claims via the NextWave Rewards platform for payout approval. The NextWave Rewards platform is our new partner incentive and promotion platform. This was built to streamline and simplify rewards claims and management for sales, as well as marketing activities related to Palo Alto Networks solutions. It enables partners to learn about and more efficiently participate in and earn points and rewards for NextWave incentives and promotions.
There has never been a better time to become a NextWave partner and to begin getting rewarded for the value you deliver. If you’re already a partner, stay in the loop on program updates with our Breakaway 1=5 blog series, and learn more about our new back-end rebates, Partner Perks and the NextWave Rewards platform on the portal.