Top Gun 51 Profile: Tricia Atchison on Citrix Partner Enablement

By | Managed Services News

Nov 23

Citrix’s managing director for worldwide enablement discusses how the pandemic shifted her game plan.

When the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly forced offices to close, Tricia Atchison was on the front line, focused on Citrix partner enablement as partners scrambled to expand customers’ virtual client access capacity. The global crisis created a surge in demand for Citrix client access licenses, added infrastructure and cloud usage.

As the Citrix executive responsible for worldwide partner enablement, that forced Atchison to recalibrate her 2020 game plan. She is a member of this year’s Channel Futures Top Gun 51 list, which recognizes premier leaders in the indirect IT and telecom channel. The criteria include advocacy for the channel and commitment to partners’ business success. There’s also dedication to earning the channel’s trust.

Tricia Atchison of Citrix

Citrix’s Tricia Atchison

Chosen by a panel of distributors, master agents and industry analysts for this year’s Top Gun 51 list, Channel Futures spoke with Atchison about how her team has helped partners address their customers’ needs to provide remote access to employees working at home. The following are some highlights, edited for clarity.

Channel Futures: Citrix is going through the shift from perpetual licensing to subscriptions. How’s that been going so far?

Tricia Atchison: It’s going well. The work we’ve done around business continuity and remote work has played well together. A lot of the work that we’ve done both from an enablement standpoint and a marketing standpoint are tied to how we’ve already been engaging with our partner community as they start to transition our joint customers to the cloud. From an enablement standpoint, one of the things that we’ve been focused on is creating a framework for our partners to guide them through the learning process. Obviously, they sell other solutions, and they have a lot of different things going on.

With the pandemic, we have been focused on business continuity. And we saw, very early on, even in the, March, April, May time frame, that as we got the enablement out and got some of the demand-gen campaigns out, we saw a huge uptick in engagement, where they were leveraging those to engage with their customer.

CF: What kind of enablement did you put into place at the beginning of the pandemic?

TA: We did some technical enablement, but in this case, particularly around business continuity and remote work, we have focused primarily on presales and sales enablement. And obviously, it was digital. But we created some modules for the partners to go in and take those at their own pace. We also did some webinars. Also, we started what we call “snackables,” where we clip some smaller snippets and things that don’t take so much time. Because some people are more willing to do something for 5 or 10 minutes versus sitting down for an hour or two hours to sit through something. We just wrapped up; we did our Summit Series, which was a digital customer event. It had three modules around cloud, security and workspace.

Citrix’s Tricia Atchison is part of Channel Partners/Channel Futures’ 2020 Top Gun 51. This program recognizes today’s channel executives who build and execute channel programs that drive partner, customer and supplier success. See the full list.

CF: What type of programs are you preparing for next year?

TA: We will continue to focus on how we help our partners help their customers transition to the cloud. You will see us focus a lot on customer adoption of the cloud. We will continue to do things to help our partners not just get their customers to the cloud, but to help them to drive that adoption with their customers. And for the work that I’m doing, I’m always thinking about our partner experience. We are looking to give them things that can enhance that experience for them with Citrix and make sure we’re giving them …

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