Torq’s Sheldon Muir on Giving Partners (and Customers) What They Want

San Francisco, California -- Torq's VP of global channels is taking a novel approach to building out the company's channel program: Focusing on customer outcomes to drive benefits and incentives for partners.

At RSAC 2025, Torq's Sheldon Muir told MSSP Alert that the channel program focuses on aligning incentives with partners' needs, emphasizing guaranteed margins and first right of refusal on services.

A truly disruptive tech company needs three things, Muir said: Great tech, great marketing, and a great channel program.

"Great tech -- which I obviously believe Torq has -- has to be met by great marketing. And the third leg of the stool is you gotta have something disruptive on the channel side. So, what we decided was let's not do the silver, gold, platinum tiering kind of model; let's come out with something fresh. And what that 'fresh' is is aligning to the incentives and the motivations of the partner rather than having a manufacturer asking partners to align to their incentives, so we literally flipped the thing on its head," Muir explained.

What does that look like in practice? There are two core pieces that partners told Torq were critical: The concept of a guaranteed margin versus discounts off of list prices and giving a partner first right of refusal on services.

Torq's Partner Acceleration Program offers guaranteed margins of up to 25% for partners that deliver their own professional services. This strategy enhances account gross and net retention while improving customer satisfaction, creating a more effective partnership dynamic by aligning partner incentives with customer needs, Muir said.

As the company expands globally, that means understanding what benefits and incentives partners in different geographies want -- not applying a one-size-fits-all approach, Muir said.

"In the Americas, we don't get asked for MDF, but when you go to partners in Europe as we're expanding there, the model is more distribution-based, and so they often want the MDF options -- it's almost the first question they ask.

The company has around 100 partners globally, including in Australia and Tokyo and Singapore, in UAE, in Israel, in Turkey, Finland, UK, France and dozens in South America. That number is growing, driven by AI-enabled security solutions like its Socrates AI analyst, with a 300% year-over-year increase in message volume and a 200% increase in U.S. employee count, Muir said. The recent acquisition of Revrod has further advanced their AI capabilities.

But as the company grows, Muir reiterated that the focus will stay where it belongs: On the partners and their expectations for customer outcomes.

"We call it customer outcome tiering. Instead of that silver, gold, platinum, tiering, we ask the partner, 'What do you want the outcome to be for your customer? Do you want to just be a reseller and race to the bottom on margin? Do you want to do professional services? Do you want to do managed services? What is the exact customer outcome, partner, that's the kind of tiering model that we have."