RingCentral is expanding the perks available to its professional services partners — but not at the expense of sales-focused partners.
The cloud communications vendor is walking a fine line amid an industrywide movement to incentivize partner-delivered services. The vendor is giving new resources to its Certified Delivery Partner program members, who provide services throughout the customer life cycle. CDP partners are receiving training, dedicated support and administrative access, and RingCentral is working to loop them into a deeper set of customer data.
But RingCentral’s VP of Channel, Brandon Thomas, stresses that not every partner wants to add a professional services bench; nor will they need to in order to remain relevant. Thomas’ team is matchmaking sales-focused agents and resellers with CDP partners that provide professional services. Rather than pushing partners to deliver services, Thomas said RingCentral wants to support those who are already developing them.
“What I don't want to ever do is build a program that is alienating a group of partners, because I think everybody has their own value that they're providing within those,” Thomas said.
Thomas didn’t call out competitors, but many partners will note the contrast with cloud contact center market competitor Zoom, which is aggressively pushing partners to add professional services.
Zoom, in its new partner program, intends to weigh services into its technology advisor’s program score, and top-tier partners are poised to earn higher front-end sales performance incentive funds, creating a financial motivation to offer services. The move rankled Zoom’s smaller TAs, who want to position themselves as consultants rather than service providers and lack the resources to hire professional services staff.
Thomas’ team is trying a nuanced approach. On one hand, it aims to reward partners that invest in certifications and services, but it wants to motivate sales-focused partners to sell.
Thomas’ expectation is that investing in services will naturally bear fruit for partners, as clients view them as strategic to their IT estate. In the meantime, RingCentral needs to level up its support for the partners. Thomas said the CDP training was previously a one-off activity, but it has evolved to “always-on.” Service-oriented partners also should get access to RingCentral executives and the RingCentral platform itself.
Many partners already have administrative access, but Thomas said they will soon get their hands on additional features that let them handle support independently of the vendor. Being able to view a customer’s propensity data, for example, will help partners improve their services and be consultative in the next sale.
“Where I view driving incentives is rewarding those partners with a higher level of service and access — dedicated support — based on the investment that they're making,” Thomas said. “I refer to it more as a kind of the carrot approach, rather than the stick.”
The guiding principle is to help partners get closer to customers.
“The reality is, if something's low margin for a supplier, it's not going to get any better when you push that onto a partner,” he said.
Driving CX, AI sales
Sales partners remain strategic for RingCentral as it drives product sales beyond its core unified-communications-as-a-service platform.
The company has pushed into contact-center-as-a-service in the last decade, positioning its UCaaS and CCaaS products as a natural bundle for businesses. Now it is infusing AI products across its installed base. Those are an AI receptionist that integrates into the UCaaS platform, a virtual contact center agent that assists human agents and a post-call insight tool. RingCentral now drives almost 10% of its annualized recurring revenue from customers using at least one of these AI products.
RingCentral’s partner incentives show its high priority for cross-sell and up-sell. Partners will get a 12-times SPIFF for deals that include CCaaS. But it’s not just a front-end incentive. The ongoing monthly commissions, which continue as long as the customer remains contracted with RingCentral, have risen for partners that attach CCaaS.
Increasing the residual commission helps tackle industrywide concerns that SPIFFs are creating customer churn. UCaaS and CCaaS vendors have offered aggressive front-end incentives over the last five years, but backend compensation often lags behind, motivating partners to switch out vendors at renewal.
“Spiffs have become commonplace within the industry in incentivizing those new acquisition sales. But I think the key piece is for longevity,” Thomas said. “The tenured partners want to see differentiation and positioning around the residual base.”
