As Verkada has evolved to meet the needs of our now 20,000 customers, we’ve also continued to evolve our partner ecosystem. In just the past year, our global partner community has grown by 40% – now totaling more than 6,500 partners – and the Verkada team that supports our partners has grown by 50%.
Earlier this week, we announced a comprehensive update to our Partner Program. The new program is designed to ensure our shared customers receive consistently high technical service levels across the globe and enable our partners to continue to grow a profitable business around Verkada.
Our new Partner Program marks an important step forward as we continue to operate as a partner-first organization and support our partners in delivering category-defining products to our shared customers.
How the program will work
Our new Partner Program has four membership levels: Diamond, Platinum, Gold, and Silver.
Diamond, Platinum, and Gold program members are Authorized Verkada partners that participate in program benefits and can promote themselves as Authorized partners. Our Silver membership level is the registration point for partners who have gone through our partner approval process but have not yet qualified to earn benefits from the program.
Our partners are trusted advisors to our mutual customers, providing a variety of technical and sales services. As such, membership levels for the program are based on a partner’s technical capability, ability to drive customer satisfaction, and sales performance.
Building a scaled technical services network
Verkada has many national and global customers, for whom obtaining consistently high levels of service throughout the globe can be challenging. Few partners have staff that can cover every region or country and so may need to subcontract work from time to time.
To meet this need, we are creating a new Verkada Premier Services designation. This designation is reserved for partners who exhibit exceptional design, installation, and services capabilities across our product lines, have a significant number of technical certifications through our programs, and who may act as either a primary or sub contractor depending on the project. We vet Premier Services partners through a rigorous internal review process and offer in-person training courses on the technical nuances of Verkada products.
The Premier Services designation is being made visible to our customers and other partners in a searchable database. Partners of any membership level can achieve the Premier Services designation.
Investing in training programs for our partners
We are further investing in our training courses to support the growth of our partners as we launch our new Partner Program.
Expanding our Verkada Certified Engineer (VCE) Program. VCE offers partners the opportunity to take rigorous, in-person training courses that will help them become technical experts in Verkada product lines – ultimately, helping them better architect and implement Verkada’s security and building solutions for our shared customers. VCE covers several product lines and associated certifications - Verkada Essentials, Access Control Specialist and, most recently, Alarms Specialist.
Building a new sales training program, Verkada Sales Professional (VSP). VSP will help train our partner sales representatives to support their sales and demo capabilities for Verkada. We’ll launch our pilot program of VSP alongside our new Partner Program on February 1, 2024.
Partners are the lifeblood of our company, and we’re committed to continuing to grow with them while delivering exceptional customer experiences. Through the launch of our new Partner Program, we believe we will accelerate our shared vision of making the communities that we live and work in safer.