Former Dialpad CRO Will Head Nextiva Revenue Efforts with Channel Focus

Nextiva has a new chief revenue officer. The company on Tuesday said one-time Dialpad chief revenue officer Jim Nystrom will be its new CRO. 

Nystrom also was executive vice president of global sales at contact center provider Five9, where he led the cloud contact center giant to 600% growth from $25 million to $400 million.

Fresh off the heels of Nextiva's January Thrio acquisition, Nextiva foresees catapulting its business VoIP functionalities to the next level, wagering on Thrio's customer experience (CX) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider already has a robust set of artificial intelligence (AI) credentials, hence one of the various strategic grounds for the acquisition. 

With a valuation of $2.7 billion and the backing of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the former Dialpad CRO is poised to lead a beefy portfolio. One member of the Nextiva leadership team said Nystrom will become "the driving force for shaping and executing" the company's growth strategies. 

Former Dialpad CRO Committed to Strengthening Channel 

Nystrom said that while he's worked for various companies in the industry, Nextiva, with its unified communications, contact center and AI-laced platform, is the most holistic.

"It even has CRM capabilities," he said. "That embeds the entire customer communication experience and the ability to communicate with customers into one platform," Nystrom shared with Channel Futures. 

Being the money guy, Nystrom believes this is one of the principal differentiators for the organization, telling us he plans to up recurring revenue opportunities for the channel by expanding a product he believes sits "ahead of what the market already offers." 

With a historical focus on selling unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions, Nystrom said his mission is to bring existing staff up to speed and hire fresh faces to focus on selling customer engagement experiences to "create new solutions with less complexity to engage with customers."

Nystrom contends that Nextiva aids in increasing revenue for channel partners, improves CX, offers cost reduction and extends tech stack efficiency. 

He called his relationship with the channel "solid," adding, "If I have 300 salespeople on my team, that's only 300 ... there's no way my 300 salespeople can build relationships, trust and deliver consultative selling/customer engagement experiences." 

This is why the former Dialpad CRO said he's 100%-focused on partnering with channel members who have spent time building trusted relationships.

The Marketplace Need Is 'Very Clear'

Having gone through what he called a "rigorous interview process," Nystrom said he had a lot of questions for the company.

"The decision was mutual and bidirectional," asserting he'd made the right choice in selecting Nextiva and vice versa.

He further shared that while legacy cloud providers are having a "hard time innovating," the vision and the execution of Nextiva is something he said is happening now, not in the future — nor is it a road map.

"This is not a three-year-execution plan, and the vision is clear, as is the execution path and the marketplace," said Nystrom.

For any potential channel partners, Nystrom said Nextiva wants to make everything simple for them, and he added that the opportunity is expanding. 

"Very few partners have fully embraced CX," Nystrom said, but some partners on the forefront in the technology services distributor space have trained their staff to do so, making some of those partners early adopters in a space presently undergoing a renaissance.