IT Tech Pulse Exclusive Interview with Craig Patterson, SVP of Global Channels & Marketing, Exabeam

Craig Patterson, SVP of Global Channels & Marketing at Exabeam, discusses how partner ecosystems, AI-powered enablement, and behavioral intelligence are reshaping cybersecurity sales and customer engagement.

Craig, you began as a quota-carrying seller at AT&T, where you’ve said reaching President’s Club “flipped a switch.” What did winning your own number teach you about helping partners win theirs?

Let me set the record straight first. At AT&T I was a direct seller, carrying a bag. The switch flipped after that, at Level 3. They handed me a module of partner accounts that barely had a pulse. Barely had a heartbeat. They were on life support. Nobody expected anything out of that territory. I rebuilt it, made President’s Club a bunch of times, and I’ve been in love with the channel ever since.

Here’s what it taught me. Partners have a number too. At the end of the day, they’re running a business, and they’re going to invest where they see a clear path to profitability. When a partner goes quiet, it’s almost never because they don’t care. It’s because the program in front of them is full of mousetraps, gotchas, and red tape.

So my job is simple: make it easy to win with us. That means transparent economics, enablement that makes their people better, and a program built for the kind of partner they actually are. Partners don’t scale on hope. They scale on predictable margin.

You’ve noted buying journeys can span roughly 28 touchpoints and six to eight partners, often before vendors engage. What do cybersecurity companies still misunderstand about how enterprise decisions really form?

That’s Jay McBain’s framework, and Jay’s a good friend. I first dug into it with him on my podcast back in 2022, and honestly, it’s even more true today.

Think about how a CISO actually buys. They hear a peer mention a problem at an industry roundtable. They listen to a podcast on the drive home. Then, they ask their MSSP what they’re seeing across other clients. The VAR runs an architecture review and flags a gap. By the time a vendor gets a meeting, the shortlist is already written.

Jay calls these the 28 moments a buyer moves through before picking a vendor. Your marketing team might touch three or four of them. Partners own the rest. Across that journey, we see six or seven partners shaping the decision, even though only a few of them ever show up on the deal itself.

That’s what most cybersecurity companies still miss. They act like the deal starts when a lead hits the CRM. Guess what? By then, you’re late. Worse, you lose deals you never even knew existed. Partners aren’t a route to market. They ARE the market.

And that buyer isn’t looking for another dashboard. The average enterprise already runs 76 security tools and can’t staff the ones it owns. Buyers want three things: detect faster, respond faster, and prove the risk actually went down. That’s the whole list.

The Exabeam APEX Partner Program tied tier advancement to certifications, and H1 channel-driven new-logo pipeline exceeded target by 138%. How does certification actually become qualified pipeline, and where does that chain usually break?

I love this question. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Enablement is a leading indicator. If partners are more educated, more curious, and more engaged, guess what happens? They convert at a higher rate, get to their first deal faster, and close faster. That’s the whole thesis behind building the Exabeam APEX Partner Program on competency instead of revenue minimums.

Where does the chain break? Right at the first link. Be honest: how does most certification work? You log into the LMS, turn the volume down, multitask, fast-forward to the quiz, and look up the answers. We built an ecosystem of professional test takers. That’s not competency.

So, we rebuilt the whole experience inside Exabeam Sherpa, our AI-powered enablement platform. Now partners practice their pitch, upload it, and get real coaching on how to say it better. When I sit down with the Exabeam Sherpa dashboard, I don’t want to see certification counts. Show me why you believe this partner is competent. Show me where the outcome scaled. Don’t confuse activity with outcomes.

The second break point is follow-through. Every partner gets a quarterly scorecard covering pipeline generated, conversion, and deal registration. The results speak for themselves. In the first half of this year, channel-driven new-logo pipeline hit 138% of target. Expansion bookings came in at 125% of plan. And the channel became our highest-volume sales source across the entire business. We didn’t get there by adding partners. We got there because the partners we already had got better.

Exabeam just unified marketing and channels under you, and you’ve said new categories aren’t built through a vendor’s website alone. Which demand-generation habits must change when partners carry the story?

When Pete handed me marketing, the logic was simple. Partners shape how customers find us, evaluate us, and decide to buy. So, the partner perspective has to be in the room from day one, not bolted on at the end. Omdia says 92% of cybersecurity spend flows through the channel. If that’s true, and it is, then marketing has to be built around it. One demand engine. One team. One story.

Three habits have to go.

First, building campaigns for your own website and then “partnerizing” them. Design for partners from the start.

Second, running two scoreboards. If marketing is counting MQLs and channel is counting partner-sourced deals, you’re optimizing the handoff, not the customer. You need one demand plan, one pipeline, and one set of metrics.

Third, treating partners like an audience instead of a demand engine. With Exabeam Sherpa, a partner can ask, “Which of my healthcare contacts line up with Exabeam’s target accounts?” Exabeam Sherpa tells them, then builds the email sequence to go after those accounts.

That’s why my first move as marketing lead wasn’t a campaign. It was research. We surveyed 600 security and finance leaders for The Agentic Insider: From Monitoring to Understanding, and we put the findings in partners’ hands first. Partners should hear the story first, not last. New categories like Agent Behavior Analytics aren’t won on a landing page. They’re won when a partner the customer already trusts walks in and says, “This is real, and here’s why it matters.”

You recently wrote that security’s question is shifting from “Who has access?” to “What are those identities actually doing?” What must partners become to advise customers deploying AI agents?

There’s a new player on the ice: AI agents. They don’t sleep. They don’t take breaks. They operate at machine speed, and more and more, they have access to the same systems, data, and workflows as your people.

So partners have to become behavioral risk advisors, not access auditors. Identity tells you what an agent can do. Behavior tells you what it is doing, and the moment it starts to drift. Our own research found that 48% of security leaders now say AI agents with excessive or unintended access are the single greatest threat to their organization. Not external attackers. AI agents.

Here’s what makes it tricky. Every individual step an agent takes can be authorized. The path is where the risk lives. We’ve already seen public cases where an agent hit a credentials roadblock, went looking for a key on its own, found one, and wiped a production database in seconds. The access was valid. The behavior wasn’t.

We’ve done this for humans for years. If someone in finance suddenly starts sending files to their personal Gmail, that’s a flag. Now we’re applying the same thinking to agents. That’s why we’re taking Agent Behavior Analytics to partners as a services practice built on agent inventory, baselining, and detection engineering. Every company standing up agents needs this layer, and most don’t know who to ask. The partners who answer that question first will own the relationship.

Omdia expects partners to facilitate nearly 60% of hyperscaler marketplace transactions by 2030. What’s your prediction: will marketplaces strengthen cybersecurity partner economics, or shrink many partners into billing intermediaries?

We’re living this one right now. Exabeam is a Google Unified Security recommended partner, and New-Scale Analytics sells through Google Cloud Marketplace, where eligible purchases draw down the customer’s existing cloud commitments. That’s a real advantage for customers, and it’s not going away.

My prediction? Marketplaces split the channel in two. If your value is processing the order, you’re going to get squeezed, because the marketplace does that for free. If your value is architecture, deployment, managed detection, and making sure the customer actually gets value, you’re going to win bigger, because the marketplace strips out procurement friction and pulls you into larger deals sooner.

Partners should create pipeline and outcomes, not just process quotes. An MSSP is attached to nearly half our deals, and no marketplace listing replaces that. So the vendor’s job is to make sure the partner who did the work gets recognized and paid inside the marketplace motion, not cut out of it.

You often say, “channel sells, ecosystem scales.” For vendors still running traditional partner programs, what’s the first habit they must abandon to build an ecosystem partners want to invest in?

Stop pretending a deal has one partner. Across the buying journey, six or seven partners shape the decision. The number hands-on in the deal itself is smaller. On most Exabeam deals today, it’s three or four:

• the security VAR who understands the problem
• the distributor who helps with deployment
• the MSSP who runs it and makes sure the customer gets value (an MSSP is attached to nearly half our deals)
• often an integrator or advisor

AI is going to close that gap. As customers deploy agents, new partners are showing up in the deal itself: firms helping with AI governance frameworks, compliance and risk advisors, and the teams building and deploying the agents. The partners who used to influence from the sidelines are stepping onto the ice.

Traditional programs pay whoever’s on the purchase order and ignore everybody else. That’s the habit to break. You make the other partners invisible, and partners don’t invest in vendors who don’t see them.

So, we rebuilt The Exabeam APEX Partner Program around two changes. First, we pay across the whole lifecycle, not just at the transaction: deal registration, first transaction, retention and renewal, and upsell and cross-sell. Second, we stopped treating every partner the same. Different roles bring different value and deserve different economics. We concentrate investment where partners drive outcomes, and we pay for conversion, not volume. The unlock isn’t more partners. It’s more capable partners.

That’s what the phrase really means. Channel sells: one partner closes one deal. Ecosystems scale: every partner who touches the customer gets recognized, enabled, and paid for the value they bring.

Exabeam Sherpa now drafts partner outreach and coaches live calls, yet Gartner finds 69% of B2B buyers still validate AI-generated insights with humans. Which parts of selling should AI never automate?

Trust. At the end of the day, that’s the whole game. The real value of AI isn’t replacing experts. It’s amplifying them. When we launched Exabeam Sherpa at our sales kickoff, I looked at my team and said, “Listen, this is not a strategy to replace you. This is a strategy to make you better.”

That 69% makes total sense when you look at how security buyers actually buy. Gartner says buyers spend just 17% of their journey with suppliers, and that’s split across every vendor in the deal. The other 83% happens in the dark, in rooms we’ll never sit in, and more and more of it runs through AI. But when buyers come out of the dark, who do they validate with? Not the vendor. The partner they already trust. In cybersecurity, where the wrong decision ends up in front of the board, that human check is where the decision really gets made.

So we’re skating to where the puck is going. Exabeam Sherpa’s roadmap leverages AI closer to the deal without taking the people out of it. We’re launching phase three this fall with an intelligence layer that drives a deliberate step from enablement to guided revenue. From passive platform to active partner operating system. Each enhancement is designed to make a partner sharper in the room, and none of them replace the partner.

So let AI do the research and the prep. It shouldn’t make the judgment call in front of a CISO. It shouldn’t deliver the hard truth a customer doesn’t want to hear. And it definitely shouldn’t carry the relationship. Relationships are built in hard times. When something breaks at 2 a.m. and a partner picks up the phone, that’s where credibility gets earned. No agent is going to earn that for you.

Thank you, Craig Patterson, for taking the time to share your insights with us.

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