Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Brandon Knight - Scaling Partner Impact with Solution Selling and AI
What happens when a globally recognized brand decides to reinvent itself and invites its partners along for the ride?
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Brandon Knight, Zoom’s Chief CX Evangelist, to explore how the company moved from meeting software leaders to serious players in the contact center space. We unpack the strategy behind shifting partners from transactional sales to solution-based selling and how modeling behavior, not just messaging, has been key to enabling this evolution.
We also discussed:
- The brand trust that led to pre-orders for Zoom Contact Center before launch
- How Zoom is enabling partners with live training and an on-demand value-selling video library
- The shift from creating AI messaging to educating partners as customers demand AI solutions
- Why partner lifetime value may be the most important metric in the channel
- The future of work with agentic AI and digital twins, and what that means for productivity and scale
If you're in the channel, building brands, or curious about the next wave of AI in partner ecosystems, this episode is not to be missed.
Connect with Brandon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjofcc/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanet and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, brandon. How are you doing Awesome? Doing fine. How are you doing man? Yeah, I'm excited for this one. This one feels a bit close to home. Uh, as my audience knows, I spent a lot of time working at zoom and today you are calling from one of the I think one of the best companies in the world and zoom yourself, maybe a bit uninitiated. You could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do yeah, well, well, I I agree with you.
Speaker 2:First of all, as far as one of the best companies in the world and definitely a great choice to me, shout out to Zoom for the selection. I appreciate that I'm Brandon Knight. By title. I am the head of the ZCX ecosystem, but really I'm the chief CX evangelist. My role is to answer that question. I get that little curious look I get from people when I start talking contact center and Zoom, because most people don't even know we have it. So that's my job. We're more than meetings people and I'm here to tell you that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was in. You know, I worked at Zoom when the potential Five Nines merger came in, and then how that CX story really came about, and to me it's a bit inside baseball, but to me this was such a logical next step where, you know, at the time, during COVID, zoom had built out the best meetings yeah, I think, inarguably the best meetings technology in the world meetings technology in the world, and so people were using video and then it just transformed into but what about all forms of communication, which is sort of where that contact contact center story sort of births from?
Speaker 1:now evangelizing that message you've I'm already sold, I'm already there. But evangelizing that message to the masses, to partners, that's a complicated shift to take partners from maybe that more transactional selling motion hey, we like Zoom meetings, that's great, let's do that all the way through to that full solution sell. How's that evangelization process going?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're exactly right and honestly, alex and you'll know this from working here and from being known in this space you have to model it. You have to show them the difference between transactional selling and solution selling or value selling. A lot of people talk about it. They say, well, the contact center is a complex product, but if I haven't sold it, that's confusing to me. So what's it going to be? What does it mean? I'm used to transactional things. I'm used to what's your address? Or if I sell meetings, how many rooms do you have? Where's the building? That's how many meetings I have it's fairly transactional.
Speaker 2:We're talking with value selling. There's more stakeholders, there's more questions, more discovery, that kind of thing. One of the things we do is we literally train it live. We show people how to do value selling, how to do solution selling. What's cool is that we recently started taking that knowledge and putting it into a video library. It's not available yet. By the time this podcast comes out, it actually will be available. But I'm working with Ken Westerman, who heads up our COE one of the smartest guys I know and we're putting together value selling, tidbit videos that partners will have access to.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I'm sort of really passionate about when it comes to my own career, when it comes to how we build ChanX and I think it's a fundamental business strategy is the power of brand. I think a lot of leaders under understand the importance of brand and they think, well you know, does brand marketing actually contribute to revenue? And I think I've got a great or you have a great articulation of why brand is so important. You have partners committing to Zoom contact Center before the product was even ready.
Speaker 2:Unbelievable. It was unbelievable. I walked into that. You were here before you know, doing the. Should we buy 5.9? Should we do our own thing? I came in slightly after the decision was made to build our own thing and so, as part of my normal, you know, getting to know people, learning the business, I found out that there were pre-orders. I'd never even heard of that. There were pre-orders for the contracts and a product and we were just releasing foam and as I got into it I found out, you know, a lot of it which I didn't even know.
Speaker 2:It started, of course, during the pandemic. Right During the coronavirus pandemic, zoom became a verb. Everyone's doing Zoom meetings, all educational Zoom meetings. But what a lot of people might not know is that Zoom wasn't the only game in town. There were actually four other companies vying for that business.
Speaker 2:When the call came out that everybody needed to go home, everybody needed to go remote, zoom just won that positioning because they decided to make it easy to stand up and get on Zoom meeting. And the coin and phrase back when you were here, the Zoom mantra was it just works right. So that created brand loyalty to. When we came out with the phone, they were like, oh well, the phone works, the phone is easy. And then we announced we're going to come out with contracts and I said, well, it's probably going to be like everything else we have from them, it's going to be easy and it's going to just work. But that was a really pleasant surprise for me. It did create a little bit of pressure right, because we're trying to design a product and go to market. So you want to get to market quickly because you already have the orders, but you have people that trust your brand to do it the right way. So it was a methodical you know, intentional release with a little pressure behind it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think Zoom built an amazing product. They wrapped that up with great brand loyalty and I sort of, since we did the prep call, I've actually articulated this to a few different businesses because what a powerful message, right. What what's really important when you're going to invest millions and years in building a product and a go-to-market is hey, what's the partner feedback like? What's the customer feedback like, how do we wrap this into a predictable motion and pre-orders? Well, they, they obviously help fund that, which is great. But second, it's immediate feedback of what's missing. I remember when Zoom was building out Phone. Obviously, you add features every month, every month, every month, but that partner and customer feedback drives that roadmap and to me, that's such a credible story in terms of the importance of building brand and how, ironically, brandon, that makes your life a little bit easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it does. And you know what I think it's important to acknowledge getting feedback from our customers on a contact center product wasn't readily available because we didn't have a contact center product right. So we got feedback in real time as we launched it out. But what really helped build it were some strategic partners. We reached out to a handful of partners in the beginning and asked them to kind of be a part of this growing thing with us, and they gave us real-life, real-time feedback on what their customers were asking for. More importantly, what were customers actually using? Because one of the questions we got in the beginning when we said we were going to build a contact center is well, what are you going to build it like? Is it going to be enterprise level? Like, is it going to match, like Nice and Five9 and Genesis, or is it going to be more like this, more like that?
Speaker 2:And our decision was we really didn't want to match anyone that was out there. We really wanted to match. What did the customer actually want? What were they using? Because there's a lot of features. This is not a knock against any of our competitors, but there's a lot of features that were rolled out in the content center space that don't really get used, Whether it's the agent doesn't understand them or they don't really have value. It's cutesy and flashy but not really pertinent. We wanted the features that customers actually needed and we trusted a handful of partners who got that information for us and shared it with us. It really helped our early success quite a bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's an absolute credit to the sort of channel relationship you and the team have built. We talk a lot on this podcast about the importance of lifetime value of an end customer, but that pales in in comparison to partner lifetime value, because those partner lifetime value one that's more than one customer right, because it's every customer. But secondly, partners can iterate both the product and the go-to-market right. They can both say, hey, here's where your program needs improving, but also here's where your product needs improving. And they are business people right, and that's my favorite thing. That's my favorite thing about working in the channel is I get to spend all day selling business, talking about business to business people, and we're all sort of in this win-win game.
Speaker 2:Maybe go on, yeah, no, no, you're right, they, they are that. That is the best part, um, about the, the channel. You know, aside from the relationships, is the shared goal right? We're, we're all working towards the same thing. These guys aren't going to give me bad advice because if I make a bad product or a bad program, it hurts them. You, you know. So it's. It's. I think it's a great symbiotic relationship. I need them to be successful. We have, like, a lot of vendors. We have a goal for the percent that we want to sell, you know, in the channel, and the partner has a, has a goal for the number of customers they want to help and the revenue they want to generate. And we all have that same goal where we want to improve life for that customer and for that customer's end users. So it's a, it's a great symbiotic relationship with, with one goal.
Speaker 1:So maybe taking that symbiosis I think that's the right word to the next level.
Speaker 1:Ai is going to affect everything when it comes to products, when it comes to operations, when it comes to go to markets, and obviously, zoom is de de facto. It's an ai company, right, it's an ai company wrapped up in in communications. Um, part of taking people on that journey in terms of how to adopt ai might be, or can be, a little bit of fomo, right, which is hey, if you don't come now, you're going to miss it. Talk to me about the messaging, the tactics that you use to sort of generate that momentum.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it's funny, alex, because we actually spent I'm going to go back a year. We actually spent a good part of an offsite meeting when we realized our AI was going to be in every product and not just parsed out, and so we said, okay, so we want messaging right, because, to your point, we have to be able to share that messaging with a partner in order for them to pick up the story and go take it. So we spent the better part of an offsite meeting talking about our messaging and how we're going to brand it and what we're going to tell them. And in the midst of rolling that out, we realized something Omo exists already in our space. It's already there because you can't go anywhere Television, internet you can't go anywhere without someone talking about AI. You know the whole open source chat, gbt thing and then generative AI. It exploded on the scene and everyone wanted it. Everyone's using it.
Speaker 2:There were debates about is it OK to use in the education system and should we use it in the legal system, and how can doctors use it. So where? Usually you have the partners trying to generate something to talk to their customers about, because they want to get in and do consulting for them. The script flipped. The customers were jumping up and down raising their hand I need AI, I need to know about AI. I got to get AI in my business, so that drove.
Speaker 2:The customer was going to their partner saying, hey, I want AI. I got a new CIO and they said we need AI. Or my marketing team saw something at a show and they want AI. So now the partner was coming back to the TSDs and coming back to the vendor saying, hey, I don't know about this AI. And coming back to the vendor saying, hey, I don't know about this AI. Like, they say they want it. What does that mean? Like how do I get it? What does it actually? So we went from trying to craft messaging to drive partners to crafting education that partners could use. Yeah, so FOMO when it comes to AI, fomo is real.
Speaker 1:But I love that right, because I think there is a lot of people talking about ai and one of the things that I find, uh, which is very often I find myself having a conversation with tom and I and I'm sort of sat there quizzically because I've been fortunate, thanks to this podcast, to speak to some real ai experts people at netapp, people at um in video, really who spend all day like understanding the technical mechanics of AI. Sometimes when I speak to people, I realize I'm getting an opinion that they found on LinkedIn. Sometimes you're like, oh, you need to talk about AI from a readiness and a proof that, hey, we're still in the source. I think an amazing thing that I saw with Zoom is one of the most complicated things about being a CEO of a publicly listed company is you have to do your earnings call, and so when I talk about AI being at the core of what Zoom does, I saw that Eric Yuan, who's the Zoom CEO, did his earnings call using an AI twin, a digital twin, which I think is one amazing publicity move.
Speaker 1:But, second, I can imagine, from a stress management availability, operational flexibility. This is what we're aiming for, Right? How do I download my brain, maybe add a few IQ points and get it to do some work that I don't have to do? Talk to me about the digital twin and AI roadmap.
Speaker 2:Yeah, first of all, I am loving this, this whole digital twin thing, just because for a lot of reasons, but even for me I can't make all the meetings that I want to make. I certainly can't thoroughly read all the emails that I get every day and I'm one person you know in an organization. So you think about the millions of people you know and this idea. It's funny because just last year we talked about it People were like, oh well, that's not now, that's in the future. They're thinking like robots and Megan and iRobot and movies and Skynet and stuff. We're talking the logical evolution of the product. Right, we went from a product that did meeting summaries and could ask some questions to taking action lists from meetings. Now, and now we have agentic AI, so now we can do reasoning right.
Speaker 2:So the biggest challenge in trying to make that personal was the large language models were too much information for it to be like me. It's sourcing from all over the place, right. Small language models which are being developed now. Now I can program my AI, I can give it my opinion, my biases, you know. I give it all the history of where I was born and how old I am. All those things. All those things lend itself to my decision-making right, my thought process. And so now you know, and now there's companies that make 3D avatars, you know. So now it's not, you know, it's not a cartoon type thing or it's not one dimensional, and now I can speak. And also, by the way, it has the language translator in it, so I don't even know. It can be me 3D speaking, but I could be speaking Spanish, you know, french, whatever. It's fascinating actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the piece, and if you're not wrapped up, sometimes, sometimes I think it's easy to forget that a lot of people think AI is some function of chat, gpt, and that's it, which is absolutely not the case. I built an agentic workflow in my company that listens to every sales call and every sales meeting and puts it through a scoring matrix and messages me the results. So it says hey, alex, like this is this. I built a ai sales coach and I can't tell you like this it took a few hours to build, put into the script, tested it a few times, redid it, redid it, redid it and it saved I don't know, 15 hours a week. Oh, and the way it does the coaching better than I do.
Speaker 1:The analysis is better, the feedback is better, and this is the thing where I get really excited, which is, you know, it can reinforce strength. So it can understand what I want your digital twin. But I'm not joking when I say but we can add a few IQ points, right. If you're not great at understanding finance metrics, that's okay, we can say build brandonai, but, by the way, he also has an mba right. And that's the thing that I think people really need to grasp is this isn't just dilution, it's actually it's. Have you ever had that dream, can I just? I wish I could clone myself 10 times.
Speaker 2:Then I could get everything done yes this is what we're talking about remember how we used to joke about that, like oh, I have so many meetings to do, I have so many things I wish, I wish I could clone myself.
Speaker 1:Well, you can yeah, yeah, with with improvement yeah, I can make it better.
Speaker 2:it's funny because because Eric actually mentioned that in the early days he wanted someone, of course, to be able to screen his emails and tell him what matters and go to meetings. But there were a couple of things he mentioned like contracting, negotiating, some of that legalese stuff he wanted to be better at. So, of course, he made his twin better at it. Who wouldn't?
Speaker 1:yeah, uh we all have the option of uh, making a better version of ourselves exactly, and I think that's where this sort of agentics is going to get really interesting, because I can have sales trainer alex, and I can have finance trainer, and I can have legal negotiator, and you have all of these models. Um, again, allow me to do the work and, I think, maybe zooming out to where the future's headed because I know you've got some great sort of thoughts around there but which allows me to do the bits of the job that I really want to do One, I'm a best at and two, I enjoy the most. Talk to me around. Just give us a little bit of optimism. When a lot of people seem to go the negative route to AI. What do you think AI is going to provide the world?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do. Like I said, a lot of people tend to go to the negative aspect of it, but I liken it to like. I look at the contact center space and I remember when I've been in the contact center space long enough to know that people used to do password resets live. They used to be a live agent that reset your password. They used to be a live agent that told you your bank balance, told you when your next payment was due. You know what I'm saying. They used to be a live agent to read off your credit card transactions, to give you a phone number. They used to be a live agent to give you the address of where a business was located, right. So we obviously have evolved, right. We went to IVRs and all that and self-service and stuff like that, and we're past the stage of push one for sales and two for support. We are now. We have live agents, we have agentic agents. They can not only ping a database and look at something. They can understand what you're actually calling about and respond to those rudimentary things. And then you take listen.
Speaker 2:One thing about this business hasn't changed Human beings are still the most expensive resource any company has. So if you now have these human beings that are not doing these mundane things now they're having higher level conversations things. They're not doing these mundane things Now, they're having higher level conversations. And oh, by the way, since they're doing less calls, they're not as pressed to rush someone off the phone or give them a half answer. You know they now can take their time. You can actually get one call resolution because they're not spending time doing things that you don't need a human brain or human empathy to accomplish. So I see that For me personally, I'm also looking forward to, like I said, sometimes I'm just double booked, triple booked.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I'm running late for a meeting and I get to a meeting a few minutes late, and in the old days you used to have to ask them is there anything for me? Or try to read through the notes. Now the AI will do all of that. It'll do all that. It'll tell me if my name was mentioned. It'll tell me if I have any tasks. So it's a time saver and one of the mantras that I use at Zoom now, where we used to be. It just works.
Speaker 2:Now I tell people our products, we design products so that you can spend less time doing the things you have to do, so you have more time to do things you want to do. Right, because we work right. But we don't, look, man, we work because you know there's people that generate bills for the lives that we want. Okay, and we have to compensate them, right. But um, you know, like, like, like you, you, you have a, you have a, you have a fairly new board. I'm sure you'd like to get to the point where you, you know your, your twin, can do some of that rudimentary stuff, but you have more time to play with your son. That's, that's, that's real life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, and I, I do really, I really see the world where you know I I've been, I'm a really interested from a just productivity nerd perspective. We've seen a few companies and a few countries implement full dayday work weeks and see productivity rise right, because it turns out, you know, people are meant to work 40, 50 hours and maybe they stretch 30 hours of work into 40 hours and actually if you condense it down and everyone has that agreement, maybe people go oh well, I'll just work out how to get more done. I really, and I've sort of interested that, but I'm definitely interested if you sort of wrap that up in AI where you go well, what would you rather do? And then suddenly we can work out all of these and we can do these things, and now I'm able to get three days worth of work done, or five days worth of work done in three days. And what does that do for society?
Speaker 1:And I think that's an amazing thing to wrap your head around. I agree, yeah, an amazing thing to wrap your head around, because I think that's, I agree, yeah, maybe then to end, we've gone from some fear stuff into the positive and now let's go to the real positive. I'd like you to give some advice to the channel people that are starting their career. They're in the first six months, year, two years of their career. What's some of the advice that you give people entering the channel today?
Speaker 2:oh, wow, entering the channel, you knew first thing and and uh, I, I really believe this when it comes to the channel, especially if you're new, enjoy the sizzle, okay, but eat the meat. You understand. I'm saying the channel is very flashy. There's a lot of awards and shows and and hours and dinners and golf and baseball and football, and there's a lot of sizzle. You know a lot of attention things. There's a lot of flashy things and, yeah, enjoy that, take that in, because that's the networking part of the channel. That's how you interact with people, that's how you get to know people. But eat the meat.
Speaker 2:Don't forget why you're there. Do the educational things. Make good use of your time. Everyone's vying for your time. When you're new in the channel, whether you're a supplier or an agent or a new employee on TSD, everyone's vying for your time and attention. Make good use of your time. Make good decisions. Enjoy the fun stuff, but absorb the educational stuff. Get better at your craft, because the channel is based on networking and relationships. That'll get you in the room. But if you're not paying attention, you don't observe the knowledge. Then you can't really help anyone. Once you're in the room, you know if you can't, you can't, you can't provide for your customer, you can't lead your customer, you can't give your customer advice on technology If all you're doing is playing golf. You know, I mean you'll, you'll, you'll meet the right people and you'll have fun, but you won't know anything. You know so. So that's, that's, that's my advice, man. Enjoy the sizzle, have the fun, but eat the meat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I think the channel's built on NRR I don't mean net rev, retention, networking, relationships and reputation, and I do really believe that there is almost no other business in the world that reputation matters more than it does in the channel, because it's actually for the billions and billions of revenue flowing through it. We're a tiny little ecosystem, right, and so you know you only. Your reputation follows with you, whether that's in partners or distributors, or vendors, customers, and you get to keep stacking on top, so going the extra mile and really, really focusing on providing value. You'd be amazing how that comes back around.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree, your reputation and it's interesting that you put it that way, because the networking happens first the relationships of what you build from the networking. But your reputation is based on what you deliver, you know. So I love that, I think. I think that those that NRR is in the right order too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it. Awesome, brandon. Well, we believe in networking on this podcast and I also believe in hopefully building a good reputation which allows you to trust me with someone in your little black book. Who did you want to invite onto the podcast? Wow, well, I. But who did you want to invite?
Speaker 2:onto the podcast. Wow. Well, I can tell you I love this experience. I love what you guys are doing and I feel like I have the perfect guest for you. Her name is Samantha Nelson. She's the vice president of CX at Tolaris. Tolaris is, you know, one of the major TSDs in our market. You know those guys well and I believe Samantha has a great story to tell, from from working at a vendor to now leading partners. Um, her organization leads partners in in this space, on, on how to sell and how to do the right things for their customers. So I think it's a good story there awesome.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited to have samantha on maybe the other side of the coin of this story, so that'd be great. Brandon, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome.
Speaker 2:No problem, thanks for having me. I've just been great.