Zoom took another crack at upgrading its channel program this week, urging partners to promote full usage of its products in an era of vendor takeouts and rising token costs.
The communications giant will raise sales incentives and rebates proportionally with the length of customer contracts and award partners a point for each $1,000 increase in monthly recurring revenue from existing customers, the company said in an announcement Tuesday. Zoom plans to unveil a managed service provider specialization in December, building on a years-long march to arm partners with admin access and, most recently, telemetry data currently being piloted.
The program updates came nearly a year after Zoom introduced a framework that awards points for services delivered in addition to sales performance. Partners can find out what tier they landed in later this month, the company said.
A points-based system lets Zoom offload implementation and management services that software providers are eager to pass on to third-party partners. More than 300 partners have signed up to deliver professional services in the last two quarters, Zoom Global Head of Channel GTM Nick Tidd told Channel Dive.
Yet the push for partner services has merely set the stage for the next big challenge — encouraging full adoption of Zoom’s product portfolio.
“Implementation is kind of the easy part,’” Tidd said. “Now let's get them to use it.”
Zoom is betting that data and financial bonuses will encourage partners to retain clients and pursue additional sales opportunities. According to Tidd, 90% of Zoom’s largest customer experience deals last quarter were a competitive takeout from another vendor.
“They want to hold these customers longer,” said David Goodwin, cofounder and CEO of Zoom partner ATC of Ohio. “They don't want them going out the back door because they really want to focus their efforts on bringing in new logos and new business.”
Zoom’s ambitions go deeper than voice, unified communications or even CX, Goodwin said. He believes the company is poised to take share from Microsoft Teams, as well as Power BI and SharePoint.
“As time progresses, [Zoom is] going to be looked at less as a video platform, and less as a phone platform, less as even a CX platform, but rather as an all-in-one platform that competes head-to-head with Microsoft,” Goodwin said.
Pricing models
Adoption matters in a volatile CX market where customers are open to switching vendors at renewal. Tokens are the other big factor behind adoption.
Ballooning token costs are scaring CFOs, eating up CIO budgets and pressuring vendors and partners to retool pricing. Zoom’s billing has started to reflect consumption-based models that Tidd said will be more commonplace in the market. Microsoft’s recent shift to make usage-based billing the default for Copilot reflects the trend.
Tidd said the Zoom Virtual Agent is consumption-based, as is its pay-as-you-go Zoom Phone plans. The company’s business process outsourcing program will use spend commitments and usage-based terms.
“I'm essentially going to have three models in market based on the customer type,” Tidd said. “We all in this agentic world are looking to find out and understand the commerce model and what role the partner plays.”
Tidd said several of Zoom’s competitors do not plan on sharing revenue with or compensating partners related to tokens.
“I'm looking at the model going, ‘OK, is there a way in which a partner can participate?” Tidd said. “And the answer is, ‘yes.’”
The ZoomMate agentic AI work surface rolled out in June illustrates how partners can monetize consumption, according to Tidd. Partners can sell the ZoomMate license, which is the foundation for setting up an agentic workflow.
“You may not get compensated on the token side of the house, but there still is a role for the partner in the model,” Tidd said.
The shift to consumption-based models is creating a glaring gap that partners can fill with practices that enable agentic workflows. Zoom has developed what Tidd calls “headless API,” which lets partners use Zoom’s telemetry on a third-party client management platform.
“I may say, ‘Hey, I want to bring in a ServiceNow instance. I may want to bring in a Salesforce instance. I want to be in a Muse instance.’ That's the connector strategy, and that is where the mystery is,” Tidd said. “As a partner, how do I build a practice that potentially has no IP in it? Your IP is your people.”
