I’m a Veteran of Channel Marketing. Here’s Why I Joined Netskope.

Jenn Jakubowicz joined Netskope as Senior Director of Global Channel & Alliance Marketing in December 2023 after previously holding roles at LastPass, BlueVoyant, and Logitech. Read on to learn more about what drew her to Netskope, her vision for the role, and what excites her most about her future here.

What drew you to this role at Netskope?

Channel is super important to me. I’ve spent my career working with channel companies, starting in a distribution focused role, eventually moving to manage the entire marketing strategy for a managed service provider over four-and-a-half years. In those roles, I gained a strong understanding of what partners needed to be successful. I took that knowledge to the vendor side and that eventually led me to Netskope. What I really love about Netskope is that channel is in our DNA. When I went through my interview process, I saw the opportunity to apply what I know works for successful channel relationships to Netskope’s existing programs. My team is focused on better enabling our partner community by implementing a partner development plan that communicates and supports our partners from recruitment to onboarding to rewarding partners for their loyalty.

Can you tell us a bit about your vision for this role?

Coming in as Senior Director of Global Channel & Alliance Marketing, one of my core focus areas is priority partner planning, making sure that we have joint business plans in place with our focused partners. And to support the rest of our partner community, we’re creating a digitally managed strategy allowing us to help partners increase in their capabilities while harnessing new opportunities for profitable revenue growth. In addition to partner development plans, I also want to better invest with our partners for pipeline development supported by enablement and incentive programs, alongside driving internal awareness at Netskope around partner marketing resources available to make it easier for partners to work with Netskope. 

I also really want to focus on a stronger collaboration with our enablement team to look at how we can offer simplified messaging to partners that is easy for them to understand and communicate to their end users. In fact, I put these ideas into practice with the launch of Netskope One back in March, where I introduced reference guides to drive awareness around customer challenges and how the Netskope One platform supports partners in solving these, along with campaign elements to start the customer conversation–packaged in one handy toolkit located on our partner portal.

What surprised you most about joining Netskope?

The thing that has surprised me the most is the level of commitment and collaboration from everyone at Netskope. I’ve worked at many organizations over the years where that wasn’t always the case when it comes to the channel, so it is notable how genuine that collaboration and support is at Netskope. When first joining Netskope, I was down a team member on one of my first projects. Members of the corporate marketing team volunteered to step in and support in various areas to help make our partner webinar kickoff a success.. It’s a total team effort here, and that was shocking to me in a good way!

What excites you most about your future at Netskope?

There’s nothing but opportunity here–an opportunity to really improve our processes and resources to make a difference for our channel and alliance partners alongside how we go to market. This fiscal year my team is focused on getting back to the basics to implement key initiatives that make it easy to partner with Netskope. I want us to focus on how we can better help our partners learn about our products to have profitable customer conversations. If we can do that, sky’s the limit for what we’re going to be able to achieve. We have the validation from the Gartner MQ and the Forrester Wave, which complements what we do on the partner side to really drive the awareness we need from customers and prospects. If we can achieve those goals, we will be unstoppable. I look forward to what else we can accomplish together with our partner community!