Freshworks’ growth gains momentum in Asia

With a new global partner program launched recently, Laura Padilla, Senior Vice President of Channels and Alliances at Freshworks believes partners in Asia are hungrier for greater success.

Freshworks’ channel ecosystem has been operating for more than a decade and continues to expand. In May this year, Freshworks launched its new global partner program for resellers and service delivery partners to deliver more customer value and rapid impact from the front lines to the bottom line.

“Even though we've had a channel for 10 years, this is a year of acceleration for us. We’re doubling down on partners and we're going partner-led in certain markets. We are really using partners to get us to that billion-dollar growth that we want to get to in the years to come,” said Laura Padilla, Senior Vice President of Channels and Alliances at Freshworks in an interview with CRN Asia during the company’s APAC partner summit in Vietnam.

According to Padilla, partners in APAC are excited about the opportunity with Freshworks. At the summit, Freshworks educated partners on the roadmap, on the new things that are happening as well as provided training, education, and provide partners the opportunity to meet and network within the Freshworks ecosystem.

For Benny Ng, co-founder and director of iZeno, the capabilities and the new partner program by Freshworks is promising, as he has also noticed a lot of passion from other partners in the ecosystem. As a Freshworks partner for just over a year, Ng believes iZeno can benefit from the partnership with Freshworks through the many opportunities available, especially in the financial and public sectors.

“It’s been very impressive and also nice to hear about the success stories from some of the other partners and some of the best practices that they can bring into the ecosystem. I can see a lot of passion from the partners as well, so it's a very strong partnership,” said Ng.

Adapting to the new partner program

Looking at Freshwork’s channel ecosystem, it currently operates an almost 100% partner model in Latin America. In Southeast Asia, the move is also towards more partner-led, as well as in some emerging markets in Europe.

“Partners are reacting really positively to the new program. From a compensation point of view, we were mostly doing a commission model before, which partners cannot recognize top-line revenue. Partners weren't also really able to own that customer experience and life cycle because it was on our paper and we're just paying them a back-end commission. It also made the partner feel like very transactional versus a strategic long-term partner with the customer. And so, we wanted to enable partners to feel empowered to own that customer experience, to get training, to build practices around us, and they are feeling that,” explained Padilla on the previous partner program.

The new program has been designed to improve all this and based on the feedback she’s been receiving from partners; it’s a welcomed change.

“It's getting them even more excited to invest even more. I've even had some partners say that with the change, they're now going to invest even more in their partnership with us. So that part is great,” said Padilla.

In terms of partner recruitment, Padilla mentioned that Freshworks is recruiting more partners. They’re currently analyzing their global coverage and are looking for partners that want to resell from a sales perspective and have that install base that maybe is unhappy with some of the competitors and want to move over to Freshworks instead.

“One of our strategies as a company is to grow services delivery through partners. We've done a map globally of areas where maybe we don't have enough services coverage, and we are actively recruiting SIs and regional SIs to be able to cover some of those services needs as well for partner. We are also working on a brand-new partner portal that will have more e-learning content, collateral, and campaigns than we do today. And that's something that we're hoping to roll out later on in the year. We also internally have several teams within the company that are now focused on partner training and enablement,” explained Padilla.

Freshworks in Asia

Looking at customers and opportunities in the Asian region, Simon Ma, Managing Director for Freshworks in Asia shared that one of the reasons why their solutions are resonating with the market is because they provide much better ROI compared to other solutions available.

“If you look at the ROI from either the Freshworks solution standpoint or ROI from our agentic and our AI capabilities, why our solutions are resonating with the market, one of the key reasons is that we can return much better ROI. And we can use the TCO for customers, generally 70% against the competition. And if you look at the market today, customers are sensitive to cost, and they want quick wins. So, we've been able to deliver quick wins for our clients and organizations and their users. They can adapt with a peace of mind knowing the ROI they're going to get.

As most CIOs struggle with getting ROI out of AI, Ma also pointed out that the great thing about Freshworks’ Feddy AI solution is that it is easy to use and it is out of the box and quick to implement.

“It’s because we do it on top of our solutions. We know the processes and we know what needs to be automated for our clients. It's very easy for them to start using it,” said Ma.

At the same time, Ma also highlighted that while Freshworks has been very strong with digital natives, they’re now witnessing an increase in adoption by traditional enterprises, especially in Asia.

“The conglomerates, the banking sector as well as the regulator markets, if you look at the landscape of customers today, all customers are digital, everyone is AI first. As they roll out more and more digital services, what's happening at the back end is the need to maintain uptime of systems. They need to understand what the underlying infrastructure is, be it physical infrastructure or virtual infrastructure. How is it impacting digital service that’s delivered to users? Therefore, they need a clear view of that and that's where our acquisition of Device42 is able to deliver advanced IT asset management has really helped them,” explained Ma.

Moreover, Ma also pointed out that in Asia, a lot of countries have about between 80% to 85% of the business being SMEs. For Ma, this has always been a sweet spot for Freshworks and that will continue to see high demand if they want to sell that segment.

“We are also getting into the larger mid-market as well as the lower end of the enterprise. That's where we are also developing certain solutions that will be more catered to that,” added Ma.

Being part of the Freshworks ecosystem

Given the growth and strategy as well as plans for Freshworks in the region, Padilla believes this is a huge opportunity for partners to invest and make a lot of money with Freshworks both on reselling as well as the services side.

“Whether you service SMB customers or mid-market or enterprise, all those customers can use Freshworks. So, it's a huge opportunity, and we are investing in you. So there is not a better time than now to become a Freshworks partner. Partners here in this region are hungry. They want more and they want more from us. There's so much that they can offer our customers. And so, I do see, with the momentum we have now, I think we can easily double that and do even more,” concluded Padilla.