How did Zoom successfully onboard 46,000 partners within a span of less than two years?
Frank Aan De Stegge, Partner Marketing Lead in Europe, explains how Zoom leveraged automation to scale in the midst of the pandemic and successfully transitioned from direct to indirect.
Tune in as Frank and Alex dive in:
_________________________
Learn more about Channext 👇
https://channext.com/
Watch on YouTube â–º
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#channelmarketing #channelpartners
How did Zoom successfully onboard 46,000 partners within a span of less than two years?
Frank Aan De Stegge, Partner Marketing Lead in Europe, explains how Zoom leveraged automation to scale in the midst of the pandemic and successfully transitioned from direct to indirect.
Tune in as Frank and Alex dive in:
_________________________
Learn more about Channext 👇
https://channext.com/
Watch on YouTube â–º
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#channelmarketing #channelpartners
Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries around partnerships and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanux and I'm really pleased to welcome our special guest this week, frank.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Alex doing very well. We had a nice drive over here to your track, so all good.
Speaker 1:Well, and you're the first guest in our brand new studio, so definitely our YouTube viewers should come and check out the new studio, but I'd love to get a little bit of an introduction. Obviously, we know each other very well, but for our guests, please introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of background about your career.
Speaker 2:I'll do that. Yeah, Frank Andersdeche, born and raised in the Netherlands. Since almost three and a half years I'm the partner marketing lead for Zoom in Europe. Interestingly, I was the first partner marketing person for Zoom outside of the US. That was a great opportunity for me to get on the train of Zoom, which started to roll, of course, since 2020. And before that, I've been in IT, product marketing, general marketing, for almost 25 years. That's how old I am.
Speaker 1:So that's how we know each other from. We were both Zoomies at the same time. We experienced the crazy level of growth that was COVID I'd love to hear a little bit about from a partner marketing perspective. Obviously we had a lot of inbound demand as a result of COVID. How did that affect your marketing?
Speaker 2:strategy. Well, we had to think about it every day, right, because, again back to the history of Zoom, zoom got started as a direct company online business, direct sales and then Channel came in as a consequence of what all happened. Right, so it really had an impact on us because we had to redo many of our partner programs, our partner marketing infrastructure, which was really basic, right, but we made it massively more modern, easy, accessible. But also, I think what happened during the pandemic is that we had to educate our partners much more on the full scope of Zoom. Right, there were a lot of issues right Back in the days, right, unfortunately, not only caused by Zoom, but also by Zoom was built for the enterprise.
Speaker 2:Then it hit the consumer and pro-sumer market tremendously. We dealt with the security situation very well, I think, in the 90-day security plan which we launched in 2020, was very well received, I think, yeah, our customers and our mission of our company deliver customer happiness were always central, right, our CEO is really monitoring that as a hawk. That secured for us also in marketing that we could focus on the key use case that users could enjoy of using it by using Zoom. That also impacted how we funded our strategies right. It's not all just on events. No, because there were no events right, we had to really go digital, go outbound, also from a general perspective, and support our partners with our MDF programs with that.
Speaker 1:And so, primarily, you're using MDF to educate the end users around why Zoom is the right solution for COVID, or are you marketing two partners as to why they should become a partner?
Speaker 2:Both right, it's both and it's even more. Of course, we had a distribution strategy back in the days, a number of years ago, ukraine. We overhauled that massively, as you know. But our MDF is really targeted to drive results with our partners, right. So we invest in individual resellers or agent partners that we have in Europe to drive more leads with them, through them together and win more deals together. So, yeah, that's how we're applying those funds to drive tangible outcomes that benefit both of us.
Speaker 1:And one of the things we here. We're always speaking to CMOs and VPs in marketing and we hear that revenue attribution as part of MDF is obviously critical that we understand how has the dollar been spent? What was the ROI? How is tracking that ROI? Because we always hear it's really really challenging, very manual. How's that process?
Speaker 2:It is, yeah, and I think at Zoom we've made some very good enhancements to our traceability back in 2020. Very hard right, really manual efforts, but through some system integrations between our deal registration platform and our Salesforce environment. So we're automatically exporting campaign codes now into the deal registration platform. So when a partner is dealing with a lead, that's translating into an opportunity, you can select a campaign from the drop-down list based on the quarter or the runtime of the campaign, depending on how we agree on that, and that then is measurable for us. So we can run Salesforce reports now that show us by MDF investment for a particular partner or a group of partners by a country, what has been the return measured on deal registrations and pipeline Awesome.
Speaker 1:And so you've spoken about Zoom, traditionally a direct business then obviously they're pivoted really hard and I'm hearing lots of amazing things about the way the channel business is really growing. But how has that marketing development program had to change and iterate really quickly to keep up with the progression of channel? Can you talk about how that move from direct to indirect from a marketing perspective, how you manage that process?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that's a big team effort, right. It's not just me as an individual or my team here in Europe doing that. That's a company effort and we're trying our best every day to stay 100% aligned with sales, the sales strategy, the go to market strategy, the route to market strategy by region and even by sub region. And that's how we are looking at that, right, Want to make sure we're investing in the right things, and the right things are tools, infrastructure, content. We already talked about the MDF program, Also talking about people right, About enabling and ensuring that we see adoption of our tools, our infrastructure, our programs. We're talking about rewards programs, right. So we really I think we're taking a much wider perspective. It's 100% perfect? I doubt it. Right, it's because we still are learning, adopting and improving how we enable our partners how we give them content, programs, tools, rewards and make them very satisfied to partner with you.
Speaker 1:And what would you describe as the sort of key challenge for going from a purely direct model and then having to rapidly accelerate into a really fast indirect model that's being wildly successful today? How do you manage that transition? What's the key problem?
Speaker 2:Well, from a marketing perspective, I think clearly it's getting to scale right, because we had thousands of partners worldwide and again, if I turn it into Europe, also for number figures, right. So how do you get to scale right? So, from that perspective, we invested in automation where we could. I think one of the key things that we implemented almost two years ago is a marketing automation platform for our partners right, that really offers everything. It is a fully automated marketing platform including email, including social media marketing and video marketing. We have an asset library with all, say, lifestyle images that our partners want to embed on their website. It has co-logo capabilities with data sheets, customizations, translation, right In 100 different languages. So we could tackle that scale problem because of that. And then we've really seen massive results. In less than two years we are at more than 46,000. Individuals going on to it this year alone, around 8,000, 9,000 downloads of content pieces individually with our pitch decks, data sheets, images, integrated campaigns.
Speaker 2:So I think that's how we got to scale by automating that, by keeping content really fresh on a monthly basis, not every quarter, because you and me we've seen examples where, again, I know that's one of your key topics the adoption of partner portals. You can put it there, but if it's irrelevant they will not come right, they will not come automatically. And I think we're doing and, of course, a lot of communication through our partner newsletters, one through our channel I can manage it in region enablement sessions, webinars so we're touching our partners more holistically than just it's on the partner portal. Go there. That doesn't work, right. So we're really taking a multi, multi faceted approach in reaching our channel partners, making sure that it can find the information and then use the information, because we have a partner marketing concert. That's a person, a physical person, not an AI person, a real person who's there as a coach, right. So we're really helping our partners to adopt it, embrace it and get to results quickly.
Speaker 2:And so the number one problem in your mind from a marketing perspective, to go from direct indirect is how do you generate scale, scale and also processes right, have to write processes in place that it's very easy for partners to do business with Zoom, right, not just on the sales side but also on the marketing side, to request MDF, to claim MDF, to make that very easy. And again also back to our mantra Zoom should be easy.
Speaker 1:And then make it easy. And so then you're tackling that pain with automation and bringing automation and people together, and then you've got that cohesive movement and then you're leveraging MDF to really drive performance. Sounds excellent, correct.
Speaker 2:For four and again as part of our partner program, we are of course we have levels right. We are currently moving into a new program that launches in February of next year. We've already trained a lot of our partners on what's coming, but of course we have different partner types right and partner levels depending on the investment that the partners doing in Zoom knowledge perspective, business perspective and that will unlock different rewards at different levels. So that's also how we're stimulating our partners to be at their best right, be the best partner they can be for Zoom, and then we will be hand in hand with them to support them in their growth Awesome.
Speaker 1:And then my experience at Zoom right. I was there during COVID and we were experiencing such monumental growth at the time, which was exhilarating to be a part of. But educate me, how's the transition post Zoom been? What has that meant for your channel strategy, your marketing strategy? How have you changed?
Speaker 2:Well, I think as a company, we changed, of course, from a technology perspective, right, we introduced, clearly, when we saw it was great to have excellent video meetings, but we saw the opportunity to bring that frictionless communication into different segments like technology telephony sorry technology telephony Zoom Contact Center that we introduced 18 months ago. We have Zoom events. That's a professional events platform for running perfect hybrid events. Workforce management is part of Contact Center. We acquired WorkVivo April to March. That's an employee engagement platform where it's all about communication, right, and we want to be that communications platform.
Speaker 2:And that costs a lot of change, right, also for the marketing department, because now we need to educate our complete channel. I know you recall that, right, zoom, you do more than meetings. Oh yeah, and that's a very important pillar for us, of course, to keep educating our channel. What are the other opportunities for them to engage with us, to expand their practice, to build a more stickiness for their business, unlock more consulting and education and services opportunities for them so they can also be a stronger partner for themselves, but also for us, of course.
Speaker 1:And when you're going through and I remember experiencing this right my background's very video-orientated Zoom was a very logical next step and then having to go back to partners that I've spoken to for years and years and suddenly go, hey, we need to talk about telephony, we need to talk about unified communications contact center. Suddenly it was like, oh, how do we have these conversations? What's the biggest challenge around doing that from a marketing perspective, that re-education, almost that rebranding from a product perspective? How do you handle that?
Speaker 2:So it's difficult. And it's not difficult. It's difficult for and again, I respect all of our partners. Right, all of our partners have invested in Zoom. They're important to us and in the future we'll see different types of partners for us. Right, we'll see partners who are very strong in AV and that's still a necessity. Right, because we need to modernize and democratize the meeting rooms inside offices with modern infrastructure and modern platforms. Some of these partners can add on adjacencies. Right, they have the room, they have the vision themselves. Right, to grow into different parts of unified communication and add telephony, because that's a very different ballgame. It's not the same ballgame, so it may seem easy, but it's not that easy. Right, it's different skillsets. You need to train different people, maybe hire different people, build a new practice with services. And it's the same with contact center. It is an adjacency, so telephony and contact center are very close to each other from an AV perspective with traditional.
Speaker 1:It's a long way away.
Speaker 2:It's a long way away, so you need to be able to willing to invest in that. The rewards will be there, but it will take perhaps a bit longer than a traditional telephony reseller or integrator who's been doing that for 15 years. Right, that makes sense. It can be hard for the traditional AV partner who maybe does not have the time or the current priority to do that. Well, that's fine. We need those partners too, right? But across the whole gamma.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for us it's been challenging to also prove ourselves to some of these UCAS and CCAS partners who've been reselling other brands for years and implementing those. So why should I take up Zoom? Why doesn't it make sense to me? Is it more profitable? Is it easier? Can I unlock more business through that? And that's what we need to prove, also from a marketing perspective, of how can we be even a better partner for them in driving more demand, more leads, more business outcomes. So I think that's a joined up effort between the sales teams and marketing to show all these different vectors, right, and make partners say, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Right, I need to talk more to Zoom. I need to figure out how we can embed you, and I think we're seeing that more and more, so I think we're really happy with the progress we're making.
Speaker 1:That's great to hear, and one of the things we often talk about here on the podcast is if you want to go fast, go direct, but if you want to go far, go channel. And one of the things that we're very obsessed with is how marketing can play a role in agility within the channel. So when you're doing that hard pivot, how are you marketing and how are you ensuring that you can help support the sales infrastructure, the technology infrastructure, to speed up, because building channels can take a very, very long time? It does, it does.
Speaker 2:Again, as I think, multi-level approach right. We have, of course, a very strong distribution channel. That's important because they are a multiplier as well from a communications perspective, towards existing research, but also prospect partners for us. And then again there are these, of course, this traditional pyramid right Of focus partners, strategic alliance partners that we are also communicating to because they are, of course, in a number of cases they are this portfolio partner for us. They can do everything, right. They can do the traditional meeting stuff, webinars, some events, but also they have the capacity to do some phone and Zoom contact center, so they can be a 360 partner for us. And they require different approaches, right, as you know. But that's how we're trying to.
Speaker 2:Of course, like I said, we are very grateful for every partner that wants to partner with Zoom. Even if they do maybe two, three, four, five transactions a year, that's great. But also, of course, we want to look at the key partners. We can do a large volume of transactions. So, across the different gamut, we have different approaches to reaching them, working with them. One is, of course, more hands on, where there is a dedicated channel account manager, versus reaching the long tail, where we have distribution primarily right To make sure that we also can reach these partners and keep them excited about what Zoom can do for them.
Speaker 1:Also, and then looking ahead to 2024, what are your key marketing priorities? Where can you see the sort of big wins coming from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think it's a great question. You always ask great questions.
Speaker 1:I love from the best.
Speaker 2:No but 2024, for us, it will be very critical to keep educating the channel on that.
Speaker 2:Zoom is much more than what they were used to see Zoom do in 2020, where we're a different organization with a different portfolio, different set of capabilities that they can take to market the services practice around, go to market with satisfied customers, because that old premise of Zoom is delightfully simple from an end user perspective is fantastic. We are able, of course, to really go to market around the three different areas. That's employee collaboration and communication, that's employee experience through the WorkVivo platform that we have a spot of our portfolio, and customer experience. So it's basically offering a total customer experience platform and educating our channel on that. From an enablement perspective, technology knowledge perspective, purely versus how do you take that to market most effectively? How can you drive the quickest results leveraging our Zoom or the demand center that I just tapped on earlier? I think that will be very important from a marketing perspective and make sure that the partners can take Zoom portfolio to market as successful as possible and grow each other's share of wallets. That's no-transcript.
Speaker 1:And we're hearing from Microsoft and Cisco, who have significant plays in the unified communication space as well, that they are doubling down and going all in on SMB for 2024. How does that mirror Zoom's plan? Is SMB something that you guys are focused on and how are you targeting that from a marketing perspective? Yeah, great question again.
Speaker 2:You know SMB already has been a very important pillar for Zoom for taking our solutions to market. Like I said, you were there when we prepared the expansion of our distribution strategy.
Speaker 2:We see a lot of needs and capabilities that our channel partners can fulfill in that space and in some markets it could even mean Zoom will go even more on channel than direct in the future.
Speaker 2:I cannot predict the future, unfortunately, but from a marketing perspective, like I said, we will be heavily working with our distribution channel to build very specific campaigns that are targeted at SMB customers because they don't have the same needs as a large enterprise organization. So I think our messaging, our positioning, our packaging right. Of course there needs to be tailored One of the things that we're doing and it's not like brand new, nobody has done it before, but we do that with some of our Alliance partners where we are building very specific packages right that a 10 people SMB organization can really quickly deploy and get up to speed with like in days, right in months. They don't have the time. It needs to be working right could be either as a service or could be, of course, still deployed locally with hardware for meeting rooms right in case such a partner doesn't need a qualitative meeting room.
Speaker 2:So I think we're going to see a multiple area of investments for Zoom in this space to also expand our success in the SMB space.
Speaker 1:So SMB is still absolutely critical for Zoom, obviously, and it's 100%.
Speaker 2:Zoom's done traditionally amazing obviously from the consumer space up and also from the enterprise space down and as you know, one quick addition because in some markets like SMB, space is 30 to 40% of the market, total addressable market right. So it's not something we take as a say that easily. We take it very seriously because there's a lot of customers who need professional communication, collaboration and not at that scale of a large enterprise, but still they need it right. So and we believe we are with the best platform for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're hearing lots in terms of the Unified Communication Space, that SMB really is the next growth lever right capturing that market, modernizing that market. And it sounds like you're working together to build specific commercial packages. Yeah, Build specific marketing programs and leveraging distribution to build that into a sort of cohesive motion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it could be an engine right because SMBs right now they're in SMB. In two or three years time it could be a large commercial account or maybe an enterprise account even. We see a lot of growth also from the startup space and the startups. They're growing very fast. So, yeah, we're tying multiple areas together to really servicing that market very well in the near future.
Speaker 1:So that's really interesting. We sometimes internally call that the HubSpot model. Hubspot have a VC backed model where they give you a huge discount if you buy HubSpot and you've been backed by certain VCs. But obviously the idea is, hey, that 10 person business is going to be a thousand person business in four years time, a much more lucrative account. And so what you're saying there is not only is SMB valuable, but you're also looking for the next rising stars, potentially in some of those accounts.
Speaker 2:And I think our company is very well connected into that space worldwide, but also here in region. We are already doing some specific initiatives around startups in EMEA, which will be not only SMBs, but I think they will quickly rise through that into larger size organizations. That's where we can be their partner with choice as well, right through our channel. We see the channel still as fundamental to that.
Speaker 1:The buzzword that we're hearing time and time again at the moment is AI. Now, I'm a big Zoom user, even once I left. Obviously, ai has been embedded into the Zoom tooling. Are you seeing AI play any impact on how you go to market as well?
Speaker 2:So I think, for what we're marketing is the capability, right, and again, yeah, it is a big priority for, well, since we launched AI companion in the middle of this year, what we are hearing back from our partners and our customers. They love it. I'm using like meeting summary every day. Right, Getting it into my oh, don't even need to tweak it, man, it's like 90%, it is correct. Okay, sometimes just change a few words before I send it off to the wider group. Now we see that AI is as, yeah, it needs to be very meaningful, right, contextual AI. That's what I'm doing. I think that's what we're doing as Zoom. It's not because AI is so big.
Speaker 2:Imagine if you were the word security. What do you mean? If we say AI, we mean AI in the context of collaboration and communication meeting summaries in the compose, chat summaries. In the near future, also voice summaries. So if you use some phone, you can make a setting, have a setting that would generate a summary that you will get as an SMS and that you can then forward, right, so I think it's really contextual, meaningful, and it should free up people's time right, to make people more productive, because we've seen research that we talked about it last week in London with 60 of our partners present.
Speaker 2:You know like mundane tasks can take up to 62% of people's time on a day. So let's say you have a meeting. Oh yeah, let me read some meeting minutes. It could take eight to 10 minutes right Before you're ready. What if you have eight meetings a day, 64 minutes of time that should be spent on different stuff. If you can cut that down to two minutes by reviewing an AI summary, save six minutes time. Six have an hour back. So all these concrete things is what AI can do in the context of communication collaboration. So next year we see a big move into that space, enabled by the Zoom portfolio.
Speaker 1:And do you feel that AI is going to play any role in terms of your marketing strategy?
Speaker 2:Yes, again back to that partner demand center that we have. We introduced that at our Zoom Topia event with new capability it's called Edit AI and Create AI, so that's embedded into our marketing platform. Partners can consume that. They can create content from scratch, Just by making sure they provide some contact parameters. What's the tone of voice? What's the segment?
Speaker 2:you want to reach. What is your company's specific persona that you want to address? Right, that's great. We just did that this morning while I'm one of our partners. It will save them time, right? Again, many of our partners use external marketing agencies still two hours for an email, 160 pounds, right, and $60, 200 euros 150 euros, but if you can cut that into 10 minutes, so I think we're really seeing those capabilities that we've embedded. Edit AI and Create AI. You can create AI from scratch or edit existing content. It will save up a lot of time. So that will help, again, automate, not even for us, but for our partners, when they want to take the two messaging and proposition to market. So, yeah, we're expecting a lot from AI in a contextual, meaningful way. Excellent.
Speaker 1:So what we're seeing there is scales, really important to you. Smb is going to be an enormous focus and potentially AI, not just from product perspective, but AI can play a generative role to help customizing, create content, driving even more scale, absolutely 100%.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we're really excited for the future. I think it looks bright again.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, Frank, it's been a real pleasure. The way we always finish our guest podcast is we'd love a recommendation for who you think we should have on next.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, I know we talked about this before.
Speaker 1:I thought you even know this, yeah, so I think I have a great guest in mind.
Speaker 2:His name is Yasin Kerban. He's my old colleague from Nutanix. He's the VP of marketing in here for Nutanix, so I think it will be a great guest for you to have a conversation with. Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, Yasin, we'll be coming your way and hopefully bringing you to a podcast studio soon. See you next week.