Nextiva Lands Well-Known TPx Vet to Lead Partner Development

Nextiva is upping its investment in partners with the appointment of Hilary Gadda as head of partner development.

Gadda, who recently departed from TPx Communications, will build and oversee the cloud communications and digital workspace provider’s partner onboarding and development group. She said the new program answers two main questions for partners: “Why Nextiva?” and “How Nextiva?”

Nextiva’s Hilary Gadda

“Why would a partner want to be with Nextiva? Why would a customer want to be with Nextiva? And then there’s the second layer, which is how to really engage to be able to truly build better businesses together,” Gadda told Channel Futures.

She will report to president Marc Stoll.

New Opportunity

Gadda announced last month that she was leaving TPx, where she was director of national channel sales and development. After a 20-year stint with TelePacific/TPx, Gadda said she weighed her next move very carefully. She said she initially leaned toward finding a job that mirrored her previous one at TPx. However, her mentors, particularly Bluewave’s Curt Allen and Datatel‘s Jeff Pontz, encouraged her to reflect on which opportunity would truly excite her.

“It took about a month and a half of just writing things down on paper and crossing them out,” Gadda said.

In the end, she said the entrepreneurial spirit she felt at Nextiva drew her to the company. She felt that partially from learning about CEO Tomas Gorny, who grew up in a small Polish village and moved to the U.S. at the age of 20 without knowing any English.

She also said she sees Nextiva setting itself apart from the large crowd of UCaaS providers. For example, she noted how the company’s new workhub platform brings together the front and back office.

“I think that they want to differentiate themselves from the herd right now. It’s not just telecom; it’s so much more. And they know that there has to be a commitment to helping the partners understand the difference,” she said.

True Partnerships

Gadda said Nextiva’s partner development program emerges out of an industrywide pain point. Vendors, she said, often do not make the necessary efforts to equip partners to sell their portfolio.

More often than not, vendors and partners first meet when the partner brings a deal that needs fulfilment.

“That’s how the engagement begins. But that’s what they focus on with the channel manager — just that deal,” Gadda said.

Gadda said vendors need to move beyond a short-term, ad hoc interaction. And the rushed nature of these engagements lead partners to feel neglected.

“They are not helping a partner understand how you get the proper quoting. What would the proper product be for that particular opportunity? How does the provisioning process work? What is then the commission outcome? What is the customer’s billing going to look like?” she said.

But Gadda said she hopes the new program will give agents, resellers, MSPs, traditional distributors and tech services distributors (TSDs) a fuller understanding of the varieties of the Nextiva portfolio and help them build a road map accordingly.

“We want them to feel that this is a long-term partnership and that we’re going to grow together,” she said. “And we’re going to be really transparent on how we’re going to do that together.”