Mimish Lesperance: One of CRN’s 100 People You Don’t Know But Should

Earlier this week, Mimish Lesperance, Sr. Director of Field and Channel Marketing at Barracuda was named as one of the IT channel’s 100 People You Don’t Know But Should for 2023. Every year, this list honors the people working tirelessly behind the scenes to craft and maintain the channel, sales and marketing programs and processes their company’s partners need to succeed.

The CRN editorial team compiles the list each year to bring well-deserved attention to the best and brightest channel contributors who work outside the spotlight. The selections are based on feedback from industry executives and leading solution providers.

To help you get to know Mimish a bit better, we sat down to talk with her about her time at Barracuda and her work with our channel partners.

Q&A with Mimish Lesperance, Sr. Director of Field and Channel Marketing

How long have you been with Barracuda? How has your role evolved over the years?

I joined Barracuda December of 2019, so I’ve been with the company almost four years now. It's been a great journey, and I’ve really learned a lot. I run both the field and channel marketing teams, so we work with partners. We also do some regional activities that are targeted to customers, but having said that,  we are a channel-first company so we don't do any direct bookings. All leads that are generated are put through our partners.

The channel continues to become a bigger and bigger part of Barracuda’s go-to-market strategy. As a matter of fact, in this current fiscal year we’ve made our biggest investments in terms of resources and programs in the channel. That has brought an evolution for us because the focus on the channel is becoming more acute. We now have more resources in the field. We have solution architects dedicated the channel, which we didn't have in the past. This is an important resource for our channel partners from a technical enablement perspective. We also brought on a VP of Worldwide Partner Ecosystems, Jason Beal, and for the Americas, a VP of Channel, Maria Martinez. My team and I partner closely with Jason and Maria. Jason is looking holistically at the partner experience and how we can improve it and grow our partnerships with our channel partners, and Maria is a great partner on the Americas Channel Sales side and aligns closely with us from a marketing perspective to look at ways to grow pipeline with our partners.

What have been some highlights for you?

When I came on board, we didn't have a person that sat in a role looking at how our partners experience engaging with Barracuda. So, my team took on special projects to help make the experience better for our partners. We looked at our partner portal, and at the time we realized we didn't really have a robust partner portal. It was a homegrown portal, and I didn’t feel it addressed what mattered to our partners at that time. We worked closely with our web team, and I'm very proud of the fact that we rebuilt it and put the content on the portal in a way we felt would improve the ability for our partners to engage with us with quick links to things partners need to get to right away like deal registration, MDF, and Barracuda Campus where they can go get their certification. We also put our webinars front and center so they can access those more easily and see the latest news on the Barracuda blog. Working on all that with the team was a big highlight.

Another thing I'm really excited about is we have started to have a consistent, ongoing Partner Advisory Board cadence. That's so important because that's how we learn. This is a forum where our partners  come and help us understand how we could be more impactful for them. What solutions should we be considering? What's missing? What's the gap? How can we help them from a sales, technical, and marketing perspective. So, it's nice to see that launched and consistently maintained. Another exciting development was the Discover 23 partner conference and bringing that in-person event to America, which we held in Denver this summer, was really successful. I could really feel the synergy and energy that came from Discover 23, which really drove engagement with our partners during and post the event.

And then finally, our engagement with the MSP side of the business has been increasing, which is great. We've traditionally operated more separately, but the channel industry has changed. Most of our partners, if you ask them if they're MSP partners, they will raise their hand. That line has blurred, so we're working very closely with our MSP team. It's very exciting, and I think we're putting our best foot forward with how we're helping our partners.

What do you enjoy most about working with our channel partners?

My entire career has been in the channel, 20-plus years of working in the channel in a variety of different roles, from sales to every type of marketing and with every size type of channel partner. I get so energized because the channel world is big from a go-to-market perspective. When you engage with your partners, you are expanding your breadth. It's an extension of your sales force. It's an extension of your engineering team. It's an extension of your technical team. To me, that is super valuable, when a company understands the benefits of a channel strategy. I also get very energized about the relationships you build in the channel. They’re so lasting. I've been at multiple companies, and it's so interesting how the relationships built at other companies follow you.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned for our channel partners?

Over the years I’ve learned that when you work with channel partners it's so important to be out in the field with them. If you sit at your desk and you're not really out in the trenches with them, you never get a true sense of what really matters. You've got to put yourself out there, whether it's at events or directly doing one-on-one engagements with our partners, this is where you start to understand where the gaps are and what we could do to improve. Partners aren't shy. They don't sell just Barracuda. They sell multiple solutions from multiple vendors, so they have great insight into so much. If you really listen, you can learn so much from them. There's best practices they can share from how they engage with their customers that we can learn from. At the end of the day, the North Star is the customer, and the partners are the go between who can help us understand their needs. So, I would say the most valuable thing I’ve learned is that we need to continue to talk to our channel partners to really understand what  customers care about and what's changing in the landscape, and to build that trust with them.

What are some goals you have for your team?

Partners want to figure out how to grow their business. We, as a company, want to figure out how to grow our business, and what keeps me up at night is figuring out what we can do to help our partners find ways to engage with customers and build pipeline. I'm constantly thinking of ways to help our partners. Is it a SPIFF? Is it a rebate program? What’s going to make them lean in even further to want to engage with us because there's a benefit in it for them and a benefit in it for their customers. So, a big goal for my team is for us to continue to think outside the box, really think of the North Star being the customer, always think about what their pain points are and ensuring that we’re working with our partners to brainstorm on what we can do to help the customer. What can we do to help the partner gain the trust of the customer, and then how can we generate pipeline together? What can we do jointly to build the pipeline that's going to ultimately benefit our partners and Barracuda as well? That's the goal that I challenge my team to think about that as well.