Top 3 unified comms trends according to Zoom

Channel veteran Dion Smith chats to CRN about his views on sales opportunities for the channel

Zoom wants to take the revenue it derives via the channel from 17 to 80 per cent of its overall revenues over the next four years.

That's according to Dion Smith, its EMEA partner boss.

A channel veteran, Smith started at HPE in the mid-90s, building its managed services business. He then moved on to Dell where he started building its first partner programme in the early 2000s.

14 months ago, he joined Zoom with the task of more than quadrupling the unified comms vendor's channel business in EMEA.

We caught up with Smith to get his opinion on what he believes are the top trends partners should be looking out for, as well as what the channel is missing right now.

1. Segmentation and verticalisation

"The first trend I would say is deeper segmentation and verticalisation.

"I think that if you wind the clock back a number of years, you could argue that quite a lot of partners were kind of ‘everything to everyone', while now there's a very strong theme of partners being very clear on where their specialism is.

"They need to know where their sweet spot is from a vertical and from a segmentation point of view.

"And I think that a lot of partners are really recognising that and therefore building use cases first, and then going to market around that."

2. A maturation of channel incentives

"The second trend, I would say is around changing expectations around channel incentives, which ties into programmes.

"I think that as companies who have a mature offering, such as ourselves, it's absolutely imperative that partners are investing into the capabilities that are needed to be able to self-support that.

"I would say there's been a maturation from vendors as to how they're ensuring that their programmes are rewarding for the time that partners are having to invest in that space.

"There's also been a big shift from transactional selling to customer success. Again, if we wind the clock back the old stack-it-up-and-ship-it-out volume, that transactional model has moved towards a more customer success journey model.

3. 'Influencer'/referral model

"The influencer or referral model has been something that's been prevalent in North America for a very long time.

"But it's pretty new still in EMEA. And I would say that the one country that has adopted it and is being the most successful with it is actually here, the UK.

"This referral model opens up significantly greater revenue opportunities for partners that just may not have the appetite to want to invest into a particular business technology.

"So an example of that, let's say, I might be a hardware reseller, and I only sell Logitech or Neo or whatever it might be.

"And I have no skill sets. And I have no aspiration to go and sell cloud or sell software as-a-service.

"But because I've got these fantastic relationships with my customers and I know when they're going to be buying all these things, I also know that they're going to be looking around, looking at a new platform for meetings or events.

"This whole referral and influencer model then gives them the ability to register an opportunity, but they don't have to invest their time. I have the resources to work on that. So they can bridge that opportunity with Zoom, we can then go and work on that opportunity.

"And when we close that opportunity, they would get a referral fee for doing that. And that is, I would say, going to be a trend that is going to evolve very quickly, over these next 12 months."

Smith claims the vendor has seen revenues from this model quadruple over the previous 12 months.

What's the channel missing?

CRN also asked Smith what opportunities he thought the channel could be missing.

He argued that a "critical indicator" to success is greater investment in skills and capabilities from partners.

"If you're a partner, it's super important now to be able to really invest in understanding what that vendors outcomes are and what they want to solve with you.

"And as an outcome of that, what partners are seeing is that they really have to invest in building their capabilities to the same level, if not greater, as the capabilities that exist in the vendor, whether those are sales capabilities or technical capabilities.

"And that's an area I would say a good percentage of partners across the UK and EMEA have really recognised and are working on.

"I would say it would definitely be a critical success factor for those partners that haven't started on that journey yet to be really clear on what capabilities they should be investing in."