Ex-Twilio, Microsoft, Oracle Exec to Head 8x8 North America Sales

Brian Paterson will lead 8x8's North American sales team as the cloud service provider's global vice president. The company also on Tuesday announced a new tier in its technology partner ecosystem.

Paterson has a track record of working at some of the biggest players in unified communications. That includes a role as vice president of sales at Genesys. While at Oracle, he led sales for the company's service cloud/social cloud divisions.

Paterson also made his mark on Microsoft as the company’s enterprise sales director, but most recently, he held the title of vice president of North American vertical sales at Twilio.

8x8's Brian Paterson

Paterson says that he looks forward to managing a single platform with "a whole heck of a lot more with less complexity," something he called a "game-changer" and a "competitive differentiation" for members of his 8x8 North American sales team.

The appointment comes almost two weeks after layoffs impacted the 8x8 sales team, including senior management.

8x8's North American Sales Leader Will 'Work Closely with Partners' 

Paterson told Channel Futures that in his role as 8x8's North American sales leader, he plans to work closely with 8x8’s channel leadership, particularly Michelle Paitich, 8x8's channel leader, who recently came on board from Salesforce.

He will do so to "support 8x8’s channel strategy as we continue to scale our partner ecosystem and deliver an exceptional partner and customer experience," Paterson shared.

Paterson believes that by being collaborative across 8x8's internal and external organization, he can build what he called "long-lasting relationships that are ultimately beneficial for 8x8, our partners, our customers, and everyone else involved."

To beef up sales, Paterson said his focus is on building a high-performance sales team to "deliver successful business outcomes to our customers." To achieve that, Paterson plans to strengthen 8x8's sales funnel "through a combination of team empowerment, efficient execution and customer-centric strategies."

He also plans to reshape the company's North American go-to-market strategy to "align with 8x8’s transformation from a UC-led company to an AI-powered contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS), unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), and communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) platform," hinting at more change to come for the cloud service provider. 

8x8 Launches 'SellWith8' for Select Partners 

The new technology program ecosystem tier announced Tuesday lends partners invited by 8x8 direct access to its road map and co-development tools for tighter integrations. 

Partners, further, get access to what the company calls exclusive joint go-to-market alignment, which it said includes co-marketing promotion and demand generation, sales strategy coordination, events and incentives across companies and channel partners.

SellWith8 partner Awaken Intelligence is set to extend integration with the 8x8 Contact Center that offers up real-time agent guidance and assistance, which they say they will support with generative AI.

Jon Arnold, principal analyst at J Arnold & Associates, told Channel Futures the move is all part of keeping up with the competition and retaining top talent within the channel with incentives.

Jon Arnold

"The move is understandable and shows they are doubling down on what they do well," said Arnold. "It does put them in a box as to how far they can grow beyond organic stuff, but that's the 'name of the game,'" Arnold told Channel Futures.

The move, Arnold contends, amounts to 8x8 fighting for and defending its territory; "up-leveling for the best partners showing 8x8's looking for a solid pipeline," Arnold shared. "All cloud providers are up against the same players and trying to stay in the game, fighting for what Microsoft Teams leaves behind."