Partner Business Manager - Ohio Valley

Overview

You manage channel partner relationships across the Ohio Valley for Cribl's data observability platform. You're recruiting new partners, enabling existing ones to sell Cribl, coordinating joint deals with direct AEs, and making sure partners hit their targets. This is split between partner enablement work (training, demo support, deal registration) and direct deal coordination where partners are involved.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series D+ (estimated $1.5B+ valuation based on growth)

Size: 1,150 employees

Growth: Scaled from $200M to $300M ARR in 2025 alone - extremely aggressive growth. Heavy hiring across all GTM functions.

Market Position: Category leader in observability data pipeline/routing. Competing in the data infrastructure/observability space against Splunk routing, Datadog agents, and point solutions.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% Partner-sourced: VARs and SIs bringing deals, especially in federal/regulated industries
• 35% Direct sales with partner overlay: AE finds the customer, you bring in implementation partner
• 25% Partner co-sell: Existing partner relationships where Cribl gets pulled into broader transformation projects

Partner-first strategy means:

• Direct AEs expect you to bring partners into their deals for implementation/services
• You're measured on partner-sourced pipeline AND partner attachment rate to direct deals
• Partners range from national SIs (Accenture, Deloitte) to regional VARs and cloud partners (AWS, Azure)

SE Support: Shared SE pool - you have to coordinate technical resources between your partners and internal SEs, which creates scheduling friction

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Splunk (for log routing), Datadog (agent-based collection), Logstash/Fluentd (open source), various point solutions for data transformation

How They Differentiate: Universal data routing layer - sits between data sources and destinations, transforms/reduces data volume before it hits expensive storage/analytics tools. Major cost savings story (30-50% reduction in data pipeline costs).

Common Objections:

• "We already have Splunk forwarders" (incumbency)
• "This adds complexity to our architecture" (another vendor/tool)
• "Our data volume isn't high enough to justify this" (fit question)

Win Themes: Cost reduction (massive), vendor-agnostic flexibility, performance at scale for large enterprise data volumes

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Partner Enablement (35%) | Deal Coordination (40%) | Partner Recruiting (15%) | Internal Meetings (10%)

Key Activities

• Partner enablement calls: 5-8 hours per week training partner sales/technical teams on Cribl's product, positioning, and demo environment. Most partners don't understand observability data infrastructure, so there's heavy education.

• Deal registration and conflict resolution: Partners register deals, you verify they're legitimate, coordinate with direct AEs when there's overlap. Lots of "who owns this account" conversations and working through channel conflict.

• Joint sales calls: You join partner-led customer calls to provide Cribl expertise, answer technical questions, explain licensing/pricing. Often you're the Cribl expert in the room while the partner owns the customer relationship.

• QBRs and pipeline reviews: Monthly or quarterly business reviews with each strategic partner reviewing pipeline, closed deals, enablement needs. You're tracking their progress against targets and figuring out where they need help.

• Internal coordination: Syncing with direct AEs on which partners to bring into deals, coordinating SE time for partner demos, working with marketing on partner campaigns, reporting up on partner performance.

• Partner recruiting: Identifying and signing up new VARs, SIs, or MSPs in your region. Pitch them on why they should add Cribl to their portfolio, get contracts signed, onboard them.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Channel conflict is constant: Partners and direct AEs both want credit for the same deals. You spend significant time negotiating splits, managing egos, and keeping everyone aligned. It's political.

• Partner enablement is a grind: Most partners have 50 vendors in their portfolio. Getting mindshare is hard. You train their team, then half of them leave or forget everything. Rinse and repeat.

• You don't control the deals: Partners own the customer relationship, so if they drop the ball, go dark, or misposition the product, you're stuck. You can't just take over - you have to influence and coach.

• Long sales cycles get longer with partners: Enterprise infrastructure deals already take 6+ months. Add partner coordination, their slower pace, and procurement/MSA negotiations, and you're looking at 9-12 months regularly.

• Internal resources are stretched: You need SEs for partner demos, but they prioritize direct deals. Marketing support for partner campaigns is limited. You're competing internally for resources.

What Success Looks Like

• You source $600K-$800K+ per quarter in net-new partner-originated pipeline
• 60%+ of direct enterprise deals in your region close with a partner attached for implementation
• 3-5 strategic partners are actively selling and closing Cribl deals each quarter
• Partners hit 75%+ of their quarterly targets with your accounts

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers (through partners):

• VP/Director of IT Operations or Infrastructure at enterprises ($500M+ revenue)
• Head of DevOps or Platform Engineering
• CISO or Security Operations leadership (for security data use cases)

What They Care About:

• Cost reduction on observability data pipelines (Splunk/Datadog bills are crushing them)
• Flexibility to route data to multiple tools without vendor lock-in
• Performance and reliability at scale (handling TB/day of logs, metrics, traces)
• Implementation and support (where your partners come in - they handle the deployment and ongoing management)

Requirements

• 3-5 years in channel/partner sales or management, ideally in infrastructure software, security, or observability/monitoring space
• Existing relationships with VARs, SIs, or MSPs in Ohio Valley region (Cincinnati, Columbus, Louisville, Indianapolis area)
• Experience with partner deal registration systems, partner portals, and channel conflict resolution
• Understanding of enterprise IT infrastructure and data pipelines (doesn't need to be deep technical, but can't be totally non-technical)
• Comfortable with 30-40% travel across the region for partner QBRs, joint customer meetings, and partner events