32 01732 759725 Q&A renew. Net new logo acquisition can be challenging, definitely, but renewals can be like a new business sale as well, because there’s so much innovation, particularly in the UC world. Pricing isn’t where it was five or six years ago. You’ve got to make sure that the offering you have is innovative and at the right market rate. That’s important when it comes to renewals as well. The other thing is a lot of partners say that customers want AI, but don’t truly understand what AI is or can do. As I said before, you’ve got to take the customer on a journey, not just throw it at them and go ‘here’s all the stuff you can have’, because that will overwhelm them. For AI to be successful, it has to be adopted, so handholding customers in the deployment and adoption phase is critical. I’m also seeing a lot of consolidation. A number of our partners are reviewing the vendors they work with, and rather than trying to offer the customer everything, they’re honing their portfolio and adopting more of a strategic advisor role. As the world becomes more complicated, you can’t work with 25 vendors in the same space. TR: Where is your growth coming from? Is it from selling more elements of the platform or through new customer acquisition? EM: In our existing base, we are definitely seeing expansion from a CX standpoint. One way we support our partners is by looking at the base they have with us, and non-8x8 customers, and through the tools we have identify intent. We can tell the partners that this customer is showing interest in workforce management or contact centre or whatever it might be. We’re really supporting our partners’ ability to: one, prioritise which customers to go after to make sure they don’t miss opportunities; and, two, tailor the messaging when they’re targeting customers. We have intent tools that will look at the account in general and tools which will look at our systems internally to see if we’ve had previous engagement with that customer so we can then join up and target that customer together. TR: Have you taken on more partners in the last year? EM: We have. I’m really excited about the trajectory 8x8 is on, from how we’re innovating from a product standpoint to where we’re going from a channel perspective. We’ve the tools. We’re bringing the ability. We’re bringing new offerings to really empower our partners. https://www.8x8.com/partners/program areas of the platform to be able to get that full holistic picture. TR: APIs have been a big part of your proposition for several years haven’t they? EM: Historically, when we were doing integrations, we would have off-the-shelf integrations, or you could work with our professional services team to do bespoke integrations. We now have SDKs, software development kits, so our partner community can build the integration. They may want to focus on dental practices or another vertical and build the integration for a particular piece of software used in that sector. We empower our partners to do that. TR: UC and contact centre are increasingly blending together. How should partners be positioning licences and UC cases to customers? EM: UC and CC are becoming more blended, and we’ve got products like Engage that sit in between the two. Rather than telling customers you need specific UC or CC licences, partners are talking about their whole estate and the solution they need. They can go in and say ‘we’ve got one platform, one solution for you and we’ll work out all the different licence types you require’, rather than trying to build off the shopping list. That’s not the world we’re in anymore. We have to make it simple for our partners, and our partners have to make it simple for their customers. It’s all outcomebased selling for us. TR: What sort of feedback do you get from partners on the market and how you can help them do better? EM: First of all, looking at their existing bases, partners tell us that every single renewal is like a new business deal. You can’t expect customers just to overwhelming. You need to take a customer on a journey, and what happens quite often is they will implement it in a certain area of their business and then spread it wider across their business once they start to get the ROI and the conversion rates from improving call handling and improving the agent experience. You have to make sure the AI’s relevant to the customer’s business, that it’s a full deployment and that it’s tailored. TR: Are customers more willing to buy into the full 8x8 platform vision, or is phased adoption still the dominant sales motion? EM: I’d say it’s a mixture of both. 8x8 is very, very strong on that single platform message: we do unified communications, we do contact centre, we do CPaaS and we work with technology partners and can bring in integrations. We’ve got workforce management built in there as well. You can come to us and you’ve got that full digital workspace communication experience. We often see customers doing POCs initially, particularly larger customers. We have a Centre of Excellence that makes sure the POC is not a trial but a live system featuring the setup the customer will get when they deploy. Once we get POCs in, the conversion rate is extremely high because we tailor them so much for those customers. Our Centre of Excellence team is brilliant at that. One other thing about the full platform vision is customers definitely want fewer vendors, more consolidation and true integration across that whole platform. Having that single platform really strengthens us as an offering for different sizes of business, from SMB to midmarket to enterprise to the public sector. Integration is key, whether that’s integrations with CRMs or integrations across the platform. When you’re using AI, it needs to be able to pull data from all the different ...continued
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