Genesys Channel Partners Aid in 'Significant Shares of Sales'

Genesys has "transformed its channel partner organization."

So says Amy Slater, VP of North American partner, global systems integrators and alliances sales, who has been at that helm for eight months and with Genesys.

"We made a strategic decision earlier this year to bring our channel partners into our regions instead of having a separate organization," she said.

She also says that Genesys has started to focus on the 20% of partners who produce 80% of the business partners bring in, investing more heavily in their efforts on multiple fronts.

"As we evolve into becoming a cloud company, no longer on-premises, we consider the partners who want to move forward with us and the ones who we want to move forward with because we now have a very different business model," Slater shared.

Genesys' Amy Slater

Slater leads the company's North American partners of all sizes and 90% of the GSI team's global efforts, among which Accenture, IBM and Deloitte are a part.

The contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider has also made two strategic hires, bringing former senior Gartner analyst David Norriee on as its SVP of product marketing on Aug. 1. At the top of the year, Genesys appointed Daniel Bailey as regional sales leader for EMEA.

Slater said she has peers in Latin America, EMEA and Asia Pacific who have similar roles, all reporting to a head of sales for the region. Those teams have individuals who support Genesys channel partner program efforts globally, Slater added.

Related:Genesys, ServiceNow Target Channel with Joint AI Offer

Genesys Channel Partners, Salesforce and Calculated Shifts

Looking to evolve beyond its CCaaS business, Genesys now emphasizes customer experience (CX), hence the rekindling of various partnerships, like the one it has had with Salesforce for the better half of a decade.

We can expect that Genesys is gearing up to discharge a fresh barrage of news at Dreamforce 2024 in September, presumably to include an even tighter partnership with Salesforce that dates back more than 10 years, with the executive all but telling Channel Futures it would do so.

We also gleaned that for two years, Slater said Genesys has been on a quest to identify those it calls "focus partners."

"We also have a longer-tail list of specialty partners," Slater told us.

With a "significant share" of sales stemming from the channel, Slater said that does not amount to merely the reseller channel. According to the Genesys exec, the CCaaS provider, too, depends on the aid of referral and influence partners.

As for Genesys' product strategy, Slater shared that partners have a more informal influence on where their product road map heads, leading to a combination of customers and partners who inform it.

Related:Genesys Names Winners of Customer Innovation Awards

"Our interest is working with our partners to transform all of our business models in support of our cloud technology, so we look toward our partners to say what works for their business as well as ours in support of our shared customers," Slater said.

Before Genesys, Slater worked at Palo Alto Networks for more than five years, acting as VP of go-to-market, cloud-delivered security, and vice president of corporate sales for the Americas.

She also spent more than 10 years splitting time between Salesforce and Cisco in sales positions. Before that, she was with AT&T in a parallel capacity.