Project Management Tools Vendor ClickUp Launches Partner Program
‘We’re serious about this. We think there’s a huge opportunity for partners to work with ClickUp,’ Chief Strategy Officer Marshall Tyler tells CRN.
ClickUp, a vendor of productivity and project management software, has launched an Alliances and Channel Ecosystem (ACE) program aimed at consultancies, resellers, service providers and other partner business types.
The San Diego-based vendor—which has about 1,000 employees, more than 8 million users across 1.6 million teams and sees work management platforms as a $56 billion total addressable market—views channel partners as a way to reach more customers in the midmarket and enterprise, Marshall Tyler, ClickUp’s chief strategy officer, told CRN.
Plus, partners give customers a better services experience, he said.
“Partners are inextricably linked to being able to help customers feel confident that they can actually achieve the value of this solution as quickly as possible,” Tyler said. “We’re serious about this. We think there’s a huge opportunity for partners to work with ClickUp. And we think it’s huge for our customers.”
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ClickUp Launches Partner Program
The vendor unveiled the ACE program as part of its LevelUp conference held virtually Tuesday and Wednesday.
The company also detailed version 3.0 of its productivity applications platform—billed on ClickUp’s website as a unified replacement for Asana, Monday.com, Jira, Trello, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Hangouts and other offerings.
Pricing plans on ClickUp’s website range from a free version to $5 per member, per month paid for the year ($9 for month-to-month) to up to $19 a member a month paid for the year ($29 for month-to-month). Enterprise packages are also available.
Gray MacKenzie, CEO of Hermitage, Pa.-based ClickUp partner ZenPilot, told CRN that his company expects to grow sales 80 percent from 2022 to 2023, the same number as last year.
What’s helped win new customers to ZenPilot and even persuade customers to leave competing products is the power of the platform, the amount of automation built in and the flexibility in how customers can use the platform, MacKenzie said.
“The vast majority of ours [customers], we’re moving them from another tool to ClickUp,” MacKenzie said.
Although some of his customers are navigating a slower business environment as the U.S. deals with inflation and rising interest rates, the ClickUp business has continued, he said. Software to make customers more productive has been a selling point.
“For this space, though, we’ve not slowed down at all,” he said. “And I think that’s largely because when their [customers’] belts tighten, they have to get more efficient and more productive. And that’s our calling card.”
ClickUp Partner Program Details
ClickUp has sellers trained to work with partners on engagements and deals, Tyler said. Partners have access to a partner portal, training and other resources to help customers.
When asked if ClickUp is seeing any of the same moderated customer demand cited by vendors including Salesforce and Microsoft, Tyler said, “We’re growing faster than anybody in our space has ever been able to grow.”
The ClickUp partner program breaks partners into three categories:
• Alliance partners, or ISVs
• Solutions partners, which are consultancies, resellers and systems integrators
• Vetted consultants, which are consultancies of about 10 employees or fewer targeting smaller customers
Tyler joined the company in May. His resume includes more than four years with ServiceNow, leaving in 2021 as vice president and global head of industry services and go-to-market, according to his LinkedIn account.
He also worked at Salesforce for more than five years. Tyler left Salesforce in 2017 with the title of COO for the Latin America regions.
His hope is for the partner program to bring partners new customer relationships, even those where ClickUp drives the sales, he said.
“They can have the opportunity to come in and help with the services delivery side of that relationship,” he said. “But also the incentive to be able to take and help customers expand on the platform, not just from additional services, but the opportunity to have a piece of the upside.”
Founded in 2017 and led by CEO Zeb Evans, the company has now reached a sales maturation level where it is ready for the channel, Tyler said.
Working with distributors is part of the channel growth strategy, but for now, the vendor is focused on delivering the best experience to a smaller group of partners, he said.
ClickUp “is exactly the type of product that partners want to work with,” Tyler said. “Not only are we high growth, not only is it early innings, but there’s such an almost limitless amount of use cases.”
Partners in other ecosystems, such as that of ClickUp strategic partner and CRM platform provider HubSpot, should look to ClickUp as a value-add to customers’ enterprise app suites, he said. ClickUp has more than 80 integrations.
“We’re in a space that really is still being defined,” he said. “The expansiveness of how customers come to realize that the way they work today is broken. And the opportunity to use software to be able to fix that is just a huge opportunity.”
The company has raised about $535 million in venture capital to date with a valuation around $4 billion. Backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.
Other vendors to launch new partner programs include Offensive Security, IBM, Open Systems’ Ontinue and WekalO.
ClickUp Latest Version 3.0 Updates
As for ClickUp 3.0, also announced during the LevelUp event, updates include:
• ClickUp AI
• Universal search
• A new design
ClickUp AI can write, generate ideas and summarize text, according to the vendor. The update comes as Microsoft and Google offer their own content-generating products. Microsoft-backed OpenAI has captured many headlines with text-generator ChatGPT and image-generator Dall-E.
Universal search can find any file in Google Drive, Slack, Figma or any other connected application. It can also search local drives and ClickUp itself, according to the vendor.
ClickUp has gained the use of portable cards to personalize the surface. Its hubs feature allows a customized view of files and collection creation. And inbox allows for team communication across documents, tasks and projects.