Nextiva Pushes Professional Demos, Partners With Inference Solutions for IVR

NEXTIVA NextCon16 — Nextiva is urging its partners to transform their approach to selling.

The cloud communications provider used Day 2 of its NextCon16 conference to further emphasize the priority of solving customer needs as opposed to selling goods and services.

“This is not commoditized phone service,” said Carl Katz, director of eastern U.S. channel sales. “This is solution selling.”

Channel executives sent a similar message to partners on Day 1, when they encouraged them to bring more of Nextiva’s add-on solutions to end users. On that day, the company profiled analytics and call center technology, but on Tuesday it looked at professional demos.

Channel chief Ira Feuerstein said in a meeting with partners that they need to make demos a regular facet of their interactions with customers.

“This is a place that I personally see that we, as a partner community — we just don’t do a great job at,” he said. “A lot of us are trying to run through the day and not do all the work that you need to do to really get a deal done.”{ad}

He said 85 percent of deals that involve professional Nextiva demos successfully close.

Nextiva also spent time sharing information about its interactive voice response (IVR) platform. The company announced on Monday that it has partnered with Inference Solutions, whose solution functions as “the brains” of the Nextiva IVR platform, according to Thomas Dickenson, vice president of sales, Inference.

Nextiva spent time during its Tuesday partner meeting to recap its activity in the channel over the past two-and-a-half years. The company brought on a new director of channel operations and now has 60 employees dedicated to the channel.

“Our partner organization is just like the rest of our organization, in the sense that we focus our partnerships like we focus on our customers,” Carl Katz said. “We want to help you succeed.”

Tuesday’s keynote featured Google’s Gopi Kallayil (pictured above), who works as chief evangelist of brand marketing. He took the audience through several examples of how companies have successfully built a brand digitally. His talk on the main stage followed Guy Kawasaki’s appearance on Day 1. Kawasaki, the former chief evangelist for Apple, led a humor-infused discussion of how to “jump the innovation curve.”