Zoom Channel Partners Get Increased Commitment from Tech Giant
Last year, an average of 32% of @Zoom’s business was comprised of transactions via the channel.
July 12, 2023
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Channel Futures: When you say it’s much easier to do business with Zoom now, can you target maybe three areas where you think that is really the case for partners?
Zoom’s Todd Surdey: When you think about the ease of doing business, we have launched ways for companies to now get to us quicker. I have three ways a partner can really connect with Zoom quickly. I have a support team that will support any partner that has a question when they dial in, and they can ask anything from a sales-y to a technical question. We now have the availability of technical teams so partners can ask those hardcore tech-related questions. The third is that I am I’m doing more of a white-glove experience for my top partners as determined by the size of revenue they’ve done. Or by specialty. For example, they may be contact-center focused. It can be that they’re very strategic to us, or they could or should be bigger for a variety of reasons.
Also, I have put a lot more emphasis on the certifications, especially as we launch new products like our contact center, that are really formed around customer experience solutions. And in fact, we have done things around compensation models to support the growth of our additional products, like our contact center, or our virtual agent, or Zoom virtual agent products. So we’re accelerating our partners’ success with not only the ability for them to get those certifications, but we’ve taken it to another level.
So let me give you some detail on that because I think the details matter. If you’re a referral partner, we’ve actually increased the SPIFF on our customer experience sales from 5x to 8x. It’s huge. If you’re a resell model, we’re giving a 50% ARR rebate based on the customer experience offering and an additional 25% ARR rebate kicker when the partner also provides deployment of that customer experience.
TS: How do we benefit as we go through and make sure that we’re taking care of these specific markets? It’s really important to us. We’re at a point within Zoom where we’ve done extremely well in that referral model, and those largely are going to come from the resale market.
The last thing I would say is not lasting. But when you think about contact center, you think about the customer experience, the virtual agent, what’s built into the platform for these partners? I have deep relationships with them. But how do I keep those deep relationships with partners? Change management is significant. So how do we help them to build the practices and the services? Contact center is huge change management. Ultimately, change management has to allow us to make sure that we can set partners up to be successful, as well as incentivizing them in a good, healthy way. And that’s why we’ve gone down this path with both the referral model and the resell model.
CF: Beyond the financials, thinking about the use of artificial intelligence and how rapidly it’s evolving, what’s Zoom’s approach to AI and how it impacts its partners?
TS: Today Zoom uses a federated approach to AI that leverages Zoom’s own proprietary AI and large language models from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and others. However, we also select customers’ own models. There’s a lot of flexibility. Flexibility is really incorporated into the multiple types of models. We provide the most value for the diverse needs of our customers. And we use those models internally as well. So we will continue to invest in AI to allow the human-to-human interactions to be more meaningful. It’s really huge for us.
However, the processes need to become much more streamlined. A much more effective contact center actually has so much built in AI, that it starts to give you a predictive type of analysis or allows you to travel where the conversation is going or could go. Some of our offerings we have today are phenomenal. If you look at a sales conversation, AI actually will take key parts of the conversation and load it directly into Salesforce for us. Zoom was born in the digital age. AI has really been built into all of our products from the start. So, for example, the Zoom meetings include the AI-powered features such as virtual backgrounds and gesture recognition. I used background noise suppression yesterday while I was sitting in my office as jets flew over top. Nobody in the meeting I was in could hear the jets. So pretty cool stuff.
Going back to your AI question, from a platform perspective, we’re really freeing up time in a person’s day with the summarization, the email and the chat-composing capabilities. There’s a lot that we’re doing behind it to be ethical, to be responsible in terms of the development, at the highest level, as Eric, our CEO, presents it to the company. Our AI approach really puts our security, our trust at the center of what we do.
CF: How is Zoom educating partners on these technologies?
TS: We did a whole technical summit in Denver. This was a few months ago. We earmarked that we’d probably have roughly 40-50 partners there. We had over 100 globally that wanted to show up to this multi-day event. We had one negative feedback, and the negative feedback was we needed more time for the event; the partners were getting so much out of it. We’re going to do many of these all over the world.
CF: What percentage of Zoom’s business is now indirect versus direct?
Last year, an average of 32% of our business was with the channel. And we saw some really incredible spikes. So even though it’s a smaller number, it’s becoming a bigger number. We need to focus in on our channel to help them with the certifications. We want to motivate partners in a healthy way, and we want to make sure that the sales connections are there. I talked about change management, and this is change management at its core. Partners are taking customers through and helping them to understand how they need to change based on competition. How do they really leverage the power of Zoom contact center, for example? Those things are really inherent to what we’re working through.
CF: What percentage of Zoom’s business is now indirect versus direct?
Last year, an average of 32% of our business was with the channel. And we saw some really incredible spikes. So even though it’s a smaller number, it’s becoming a bigger number. We need to focus in on our channel to help them with the certifications. We want to motivate partners in a healthy way, and we want to make sure that the sales connections are there. I talked about change management, and this is change management at its core. Partners are taking customers through and helping them to understand how they need to change based on competition. How do they really leverage the power of Zoom contact center, for example? Those things are really inherent to what we’re working through.
Zoom channel partners are seeing a renaissance. And so is the tech giant in the indirect market. The company’s channel now contributes more than 30% to its non-online bookings globally and more than 32% to Zoom Phone. Zoom Phone surpassed 10% of revenue in the last quarter.
For Todd Surdey, head of global channels and business development at Zoom, this success is partly because partners are getting renewed attention from the highest levels of the company. In the last eight months, Zoom completely “rehabbed” its partner program, emphasizing more certification initiatives and bolstering spiffs for referral partners. And that’s just to name a few.
Channel Futures sat down with Surdey to talk about those developments with Zoom channel partners. He also discusses how he’s spearheaded new partner education programs and customer support for partners. He also espouses Zoom’s approach to artificial intelligence and why partners should feel confident about the company’s federated AI goals.
Here’s our most recent list of important channel-program changes you should know. |
Channel Futures: I know you’ve been busy the last couple of months. Could you offer a recap of where Zoom is regarding Zoom channel partners and your partner program? How have initiatives evolved since we last talked eight months ago?
Zoom’s Todd Surdey
Todd Surdey: It’s been an amazing journey. If you think about some of the big things that I had announced at Partner Connect, which was part of Zoomtopia, we’ve actually implemented all of those. And even better, we’re really fine-tuning what we should do as it relates to the success of our partners. We’ve completely rehabbed and up leveled the entire partner program. Our goal is improving the ease of doing business. One of the critical things we’ve done is change the go-to-market. It’s morphed on the Zoom side, and it’s designed to support our partners in a in a way that allows them to grow and to work much closer with the Zoom direct seller or selling teams which was really not there in the past.
When you think about operations as it relates to that, we now have more self-service things that we’re doing. So, if I’m a partner, we actually have new ways of supporting them where they can dial in and get the help that they need, whether it be technical or sales wise, irrespective of trying to track down a person. It’s always great to have a person that you can rely on, but that person may decide to take some time off. There are a whole bunch of things we’ve done around that. And the last thing I’d say is, how do you really start to generate and build up the knowledge base and the ability of our partner base? These are areas we’re successfully working on.
We’ve made such incredible strides, but more work is to be done on this journey regarding what we’re doing and how we want to do it with partners. The biggest thing I can tell you that I’ve seen happen in the last few months is channel partners are core to the strategy for all of Zoom. I don’t know if we could have really said that in the past. But now they’re the core. Zoom is trying to get to the $5 billion to $10 billion mark. And partners are instrumental in that.
See the slideshow above for the rest of our conversation with Surdey in regard to Zoom channel partners, including the company’s approach to AI and a comparison between direct and indirect sales at Zoom.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Claudia Adrien or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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