Facebook Australia wants partners to drive exponential growth

Facebook is hoping to drive "exponential growth" of its collaboration platform Workplace in Australia with help from channel partners as it kicks off a search for a new strategic partner manager.

The senior role, based in Sydney, will first and foremost be charged with working with Facebook's largest and "most strategic customers" and building long-term relationships with both partners and customers.

A significant part of the role will be as a customer advocate, Facebook wrote in a recruitment advertisement for the position. The successful candidate will function as a liaison between customers and Workplace's internal teams, including partners, solution architects, marketing and product teams.

"This is a hands-on, high execution role which requires excellent business, technical and analytical skills to launch our product with Fortune 500 companies," said Facebook.

"This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a fast growing team and become a true partner to our most strategic customers and shape how our product evolves by representing the voice of the customer."

Workplace is a subscription-based collaboration product designed for workplace communication that includes similar functionality to Facebook's flagship social media platform. Workplace launched in October 2016 as a competitor to collaboration tools such as Slack, Atlassian and Microsoft Teams. Workplace had about a dozen channel partners in the US at the time of launch.

The first Australian company revealed as a Workplace customer was NBN Co, which was said to have had 90 percent of its 6000 employees using the platform before its official launch.

Key responsibilities for the strategic partner manager role include developing relationships with customers as a trusted advisor, identify new opportunity for business transformation with Workplace and partner with growth managers to drive "exponential growth of Workplace" in Australia and New Zealand.

Facebook is looking for a candidate with a minimum of 10 years' experience in account management, sales, or implementation experience at a software company, and five years' experience in business development, account management or project management experience in Australia or New Zealand.

The company also prefers a candidate with hands-on experience with Workplace, or other collaboration tools from Salesforce, Gainsight, Totango or Tableau.

Since launching in 2016, Workplace has seen a handful of major updates, such as integration with products from Microsoft, Salesforce and Box such as being able to access Office 365 documents.

Last month, Facebook said it had introduced 50 new integrations to allow customers to link their Workplace deployments to other popular enterprise SaaS tools.

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Originally published at https://www.crn.com.au/news/facebook-australia-wants-partners-to-drive-exponential-growth-of-workplace-496014