A Lucrative and Rapidly Expanding Market
The PDF software market is booming, with analyst forecasts projecting global revenue to surpass $10bn by 2024. This surge is being driven by the universal need for secure document sharing, editing, and digital signature capabilities across industries.
More businesses have been forced to digitize workflows and adopt hybrid or remote work models in the post-pandemic era, causing a rapid demand for PDF productivity tools. Many industries, including healthcare, legal, finance, and education are scrambling to modernise outdated paper-based processes.
For UK resellers, this represents an extraordinary recurring revenue opportunity – one that legacy PDF vendors have struggled to fully capitalise on. Enter Foxit, dedicated to a channel-first go-to-market model for its award-winning PDF solutions. Foxit is not, however, a new start up. The company celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2021 and is going from strength to strength in hypergrowth globally.
My Journey Building Foxit’s Channel Business
When I joined Foxit as Director of EMEA Channel Sales in 2019, the company was already an established PDF technology leader, serving large enterprises and government agencies worldwide. However, its channel programme was still in its infancy.
My mission was clear: build a world-class channel programme from the ground up to empower reseller partners with the training, resources, and incentives to drive consistent growth through Foxit’s innovative PDF products.
In the four years since, we have made incredible strides. Foxit’s global channel ecosystem has expanded rapidly, now spanning over 1,000 active resellers across thirty-eight countries. In the UK specifically, Foxit has attracted many of the nation’s top technology solutions providers as active reseller partners.
This impressive growth can be attributed to our steadfast commitment to the channel and heavy investment in partner enablement. But most importantly, it is a direct result of Foxit’s compelling and different approach to the PDF software market.
The Meaningful Alternative to Adobe Acrobat
Unlike Adobe, which has expanded into a bewildering array of creative software verticals, Foxit’s focus remains squarely on PDF technology innovation. This single-minded dedication has been a key driver of the company’s success.
By concentrating all R&D efforts into a unified, enterprise-grade PDF platform spanning editing, annotations, security, redaction, compression, and digital signatures, Foxit has rapidly outpaced Adobe’s PDF capabilities.
This hyper-focused PDF vision has enabled us to release updates and enhancements at a blistering pace, quickly making other players stagnant technology seem outdated.
Most critically, Foxit PDF Suite pricing beats Acrobat on every front. Our solutions deliver more features, higher performance, stronger security, and dramatically lower costs through simple, affordable subscription and perpetual license models.
Built from the ground up to be easy to adopt, use, and maintain, Foxit’s Intelligent Document Platform eliminates frustrating closed ecosystems in favour of open integration with leading document management systems, cloud storage platforms, e-signature providers and more.
The bottom line is by concentrating purely on pushing the boundaries of what is possible with PDF, Foxit is winning over businesses that have become frustrated by Adobe’s excessive costs, shortcomings, and lack of innovation when it comes to PDF.
Rapid Enterprise Adoption of a Superior Solution
Foxit’s singular PDF focus has fuelled rapid adoption among enterprises seeking a more capable, secure, and cost-effective Acrobat replacement.
Accelerating growth from key logo customers underscores the serious technological advantages Foxit PDF Editor delivers over Acrobat. The company’s PDF compression is 5-10x better, shaving gigabytes off document repositories. Foxit’s file conversion is broader, security encryption is stronger, and we support unique use cases like PDF/A for archiving and redaction.
Increasingly, customers tell us they are simply fed up with Adobe’s year-over-year Acrobat price increases despite minimal major enhancements. Others have had poor customer support experiences. With Foxit, they get more powerful PDF software, lower costs, transparent pricing models, and highly-rated customer support – a winning combination.
The Channel is Core to Foxit’s Mission
While this profound enterprise traction is exciting, Foxit’s primary mission is being the PDF solution of choice for our channel partners. Our company’s vision is to empower resellers with a superior alternative to Acrobat that they can leverage to drive profits.
Foxit takes a consultative approach, aiming to understand each partner’s unique business model, sales motions, verticals, and go-to-market priorities. The company then tailor co-marketing campaigns, incentives, training, and sales plays accordingly.
Foxit’s channel team takes an extremely hands-on approach, going far beyond simply processing orders. We will conduct joint account mapping, opportunity nurturing, and even get involved in the technical validation stages of the sales cycle.
Furthermore, we arm partners with an abundance of customisable assets including case studies, whitepapers, presentations, videos and more. Foxit will even draft targeted email cadences on their partners behalf. The goal is to make it effortless for resellers to effectively position and sell Foxit to their customer bases.
Mastering the Complex Sale and Land-and-Expand Model
While most businesses have a relative straightforward requirement for PDF capabilities, large enterprises often have more intricate needs that create opportunities for channel partners to land and expand.
For instance, large enterprises may want to standardise on a single PDF solution across the entire organisation for document security, compliance, accessibility, and control purposes. Or the organisation may need PDF editing and annotation tools integrated into sophisticated document workflow systems.
Foxit’s enterprise-grade architecture along with our development team allows us to meet these more complex requirements with ease. Our solutions API, for example, lets developers build customised PDF functionality directly into their applications. Foxit has also launched Foxit e-Sign for Salesforce.
With affordable volume pricing tiers, businesses can cost-effectively outfit every worker with Foxit PDF capabilities. The company’s scalable multi-tenant cloud or on-prem deployments satisfy the most stringent IT management and security requirements.
Foxit’s Customer Success team focuses on helping customers derive maximum value through training, process optimisation and proactively highlighting new use cases that expand adoption. We see ourselves as long-term strategic partners, not just PDF vendors.
Unmatched Partner Incentives and Programmes
To recruit and incentivise top channel talent, Foxit partners with highly compelling programmes including:
- Lucrative margins
- Deal registration programme protecting partner opportunities
- Displacement campaigns
- Renewal management and marketing development funds
- Rich training curriculum
- Dedicated partner portals for co-branding and sales tools
- Quarterly SPIFFs, rebates, and other promotions
- Yearly Partner Connect Events at fantastic locations
We continually solicit feedback from our global partner community to optimise our programme to their needs and preferences. For example, we recently streamlined Foxit’s deal registration process based on partner input to make it even easier and faster.
Foxit’s dedication to putting partners first is evident in our exceptionally high year-over-year channel revenue retention rate of over 98%. Once resellers experience how effortless and lucrative offering Foxit PDF solutions can be, they become partners for life.
The Growth Runway Ahead
Foxit continues to experience explosive worldwide growth, both in our reseller base and customer deployments. In recent months we have added channel distribution juggernauts Westcoast, QBSD and Prianto to our partner roster.
However, we still see a massive untapped opportunity, especially in the UK market. Many organisations remain unnecessarily weighed down by legacy Acrobat technology that fails to meet their evolving digital transformation needs.
Aided by the channel’s domain expertise across key verticals like legal, finance, healthcare and manufacturing, Foxit is poised to reshape the PDF landscape. Our goal is to rapidly expand revenues for our UK partners in the fast-growing multi-billion-pound PDF industry.
If you are looking to add a highly profitable, in-demand product line to your portfolio, I invite you to join the growing ranks of resellers benefiting from Foxit’s game-changing PDF solutions and channel-centric model.
The time is now to capitalise on this lucrative $10 billion global market opportunity through a vendor 100% committed to your success. Let us explore a partnership and accelerate our mutual growth in 2024 and beyond. Please feel free to email me to find out how Foxit can help your business grow.
Escape the ordinary, embrace the EXCEPTIONAL with Foxit!
This article was produced in association with FoxIT and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
Paul Jackson
Paul Jackson is Director of EMEA Channel Sales at Foxit
