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Tony Poer - The Evolution of Partnerships in CX · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we dive deep into the mysteries and the secrets of partnerships and the channel.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Michel Tole.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm head of marketing at Chanext and I'll be your host for today.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm excited to sit down with Tony Poor, director of Channel CX programs at 8x8.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: Tony, great to have you on.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: How are you?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm good, Michelle.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, before we kick off, can you maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, so my name's Tony Poor.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I am the director of our global agency partner program here at 8x8.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's um it's a cross-functional role where I work with our marketing team, our finance team.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I run the partner program, but I also do a lot of uh evangelism about our products and what we're doing in the space.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, mostly I work within the agency and TSD ecosystem, although I do wind up touching direct customers or resale partners from time to time.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but my goal is just to help grow pipeline and revenue, specifically around CX, because that's I think the major driver for a lot of people.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's my background.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was a sales engineer for a long time prior to joining 8 Byte, and then also here at 8 Byte, I was a sales engineer for about four years.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been on the technical side, but my focus is helping partners simplify the story when you're talking about a pretty broad spectrum of products.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um my goal is you know simplifying that CX message.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and when I'm when I'm not doing that, uh I live in Flagstaff, Arizona with my family and my dogs.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm uh if I'm not skiing or hiking or playing guitar, I'm chasing them around the country doing sporting events.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but uh I get paid to talk about 8x8 and contact center.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um we'll we'll talk a little bit about guitars after this recording stops, at least.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um hey, by the way, I was just thinking, you mentioned that you kind of switch from the technical side to more sales engineering, uh, from sales engineering more to the sales and marketing side and the channel side.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: I've always felt that having that deep tech knowledge really does help shape that message.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I think it's easier to tell a great story if you actually know what your product is doing, and it's a really underrated skill to have.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's cool to hear uh someone go through that trajectory.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's really important.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you've spent a large portion of your career in customer experience and sales engineering.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now you've kind of shifted more to almost a strategic role shaping 8x8's channel strategy.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, what really pushed that shift towards the channel and what's keeping you there?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, anybody who's been a sales engineer is probably going to recognize this.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: When you're on the direct side, a lot of times you're you get to dig into the weeds with one specific customer, and you can solve that one specific customer's problems.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're pretty reactive to a lot of things, but but at the end of the day, you're you're really only impacting a small subset of the potential customers that are out there.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what I saw over and over again is that a a solution or a challenge that a customer had, I was realizing, hey, this is probably something that a lot of people are dealing with.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I this is a message that we could go out and say, hey, when you see this, these are the steps to follow.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do X, Y, and Z or uh, you know, take a different action than just freaking out and calling sales engineering.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like there, there's there's a consistent series of steps that you can take.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, I was also realizing the channel is pulling me in to speak to our partners about that exact subject.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So from a scalability standpoint, sales engineering is great, but you can't help as many people when you're a sales engineer.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: You've got that one specific customer and you get to know them really, really well.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I saw so many times where a partner I would talk to a couple days after we had discussed a solution or a problem, and they would say something like, Oh, well, I went with a different vendor because I didn't know you guys did this.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say to myself, man, I just solved that exact problem for a different partner.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I wish, I wish you knew that.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: I wish we had a way to broadcast every single thing we're working on to you guys and bring it up from the trenches and make it on the front line.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: But um, it's almost impossible.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that became the challenge that I started to go after because I could I could go to a conference, I could go sit in a room full of partners, and I could talk about a specific solution.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I could you see their eyes light up and say, I've got customers who are dealing with that exactly.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And now we're scaling, right?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: As opposed to solving one problem.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't sold all those other deals, but maybe I've got 10 deal registrations, 15 deal registrations.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The the idea that that you have a bigger impact in the channel, I think, is probably what drew me here the most.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but candidly, also there's a lot, there's a lot to be said for not having to be as reactive.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And someone says, hey, I need you to be in in Rapid City, Iowa on Thursday to close this deal.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't happen in the channel, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So selfishly there's some of that.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: But but I like I like the scalability.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I like the fact that there's a lot of a lot of greenfield, show me how this works and help me make my business better.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm helping the end customer, but I I like helping the partners a lot too.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I think that's such a fascinating perspective, Red, because I think we all feel that our challenges are are relatively unique.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think in a sense they are, but there is uh almost like a blueprint to the challenges that specific industries have, regardless of how how like complex that industry is.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And if you can actually nail down and hone in on those challenges, you almost come across a psychic, right?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: You walk into a meeting and everybody's like, wait, of course I of course I have that issue.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, how would you know?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was talking about this yesterday, you know.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, would you go in if you can whether you're a uh whether you work with a vendor or with a partner, if you can go in and say, hey, I'm I'm guessing because you do this that that this is a challenge, right?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I bet because you run a contact center, your attrition rate for those agents is somewhere around 40%.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And even if they didn't tell you that, you you look like you understand that industry really well.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it just happens to be you saw you know the last 10 contact centers you dealt with, that's what happened.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, when you can add value like that, um uh that like getting the partners excited because they say, Oh, that, yeah, that's my challenge.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: You get it.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that that is a that's much more exciting than coming in and saying, here's here's a bunch of solutions I can offer, pick the right one, right?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a bit more walled off, right?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think I I I used to call this uh the nod effect when I was at conferences, speaking at conferences where I would talk about something that seemed highly specific to my audience.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, it was like, yeah, every every single customer I talk to has this problem.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: And you just start to see people nodding.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think you'll I you'll get I get partners that say, I want I want to focus, I want to specialize in a particular vertical, which I completely respect because once you understand that industry, you do really well.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But when you get into the nuts and bolts, a hospital is not that different from a manufacturing facility.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: When you're engineering it, it's not.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, you might have a couple of different use cases, but the the solution set, what you're building really is not that different.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's when you can when you can talk in terms of uh of customer solutions and customer challenges instead of here's a feature, that's where you start to really, I think, move the needle with a partner.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 100%.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: But even if we're basically close to psychic and we can address those challenges effectively, um I I I can still imagine that it's it's really hard to scale that engagement across thousands of partners.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: So so what are you seeing really works?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: What doesn't work?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: What are your thoughts on this?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, we've been doing this for a while, and I think COVID really accelerated some of it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: But like the I I we know for a fact that if you just get onto a webinar and start talking about every feature you have, I mean, you might as well have just not done the webinar, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Feature dumps and product updates that are disguised as training.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those could be an email.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: If all you're gonna do is just walk through and say, this is what it is, this is what it does, that's that's not adding value, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're just talking about what a specific product does.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: But if you go back and think about, you know, customers don't think about features, they think about the problems they have.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when we when we position a webinar, is here's a bunch of features that there's an automatic disconnect, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um the partner portal is has always been a challenge.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've got, I think we've got a good portal.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's full of content, but the challenge is always getting people to use it, right?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like know that, hey, this is your one-stop shopper.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And assuming that partners are gonna self-educate, I want every partner to self-educate.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the reality is a lot of them don't.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that are invested in eight by eight are gonna educate and they're gonna, they're gonna drive that.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: But those, those are the partners that I don't need to massage as much, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I need to get those ones that only sell eight by eight every once in a while that are kind of on the fringe.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you if you assume that they're gonna educate, you assume that by educating you just tell them about features, we know that that doesn't work.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not I'm not bitter about it.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly put a lot of effort into it, but it's like it shows this this doesn't move the needle in a meaningful way in either direction.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: So what we've started doing is focusing more, and I'll get to what we're doing from an AI standpoint, but just like in terms of the thought process, we have to create repeatable sales motions that a partner could utilize, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Give them usable customer scenarios that they can talk around.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, at least in the first conversation, the partner probably doesn't care, and frankly, I don't think the customer cares either, what the exact makeup of the solution is, right?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care if it's one vendor versus five vendors, they don't care if I'm doing integrations, they don't care if I'm calling a web callback API, they just care that this challenge got solved, right?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if we can train on how to identify those challenges, talk about the specific sales motion that you would need to address that challenge, and then giving them the tools to take the next steps, not necessarily slides and not necessarily the answer, but the tools to take the next step, that's where I think we're gonna see more traction.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: The trick is all right, I've got to give you, I've got to retool my enablement cadence to focus on repeatable sales motions and things like and when I say emotion, I mean like we we drive a lot of business from customers that are migrating off of legacy on-prem systems and going into unified communications and contact centering the cloud for the first time.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a sales motion that I can repeat over and over again, whether you're on a MyTel, an Avaya, a Cisco, whatever.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's a finite set of questions.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not finite, but there's a pretty solid set of questions that I can use to determine how am I going to get from point A to point B.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's a sales motion that I could arm you with, and then the details will figure those out as the deal moves on.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that that's a big piece of it.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Segmenting our partners by by their commitment level and their capability level, that's another one.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mentioned those partners that there are partners that have bought in and that are educating themselves, and that that top 20-ish percent of partners is responsible for 80% of our business, right?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which I think is probably the case in most organizations.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we segment those guys, but then in the rest of that group, right?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: How do we we can segment them by how committed they are to selling 8x8, what their capabilities are, what the ancillary products they are that are selling.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if we're gonna we use internal AI models to say, all right, I've got a partner score.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I can I can dictate, do I want to invest more time in this partner?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Should I just invite invite these guys to a webinar?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: What's the easiest way to do this?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then giving them not just creating the talk track around it, but giving them the assets in the fields that they can do this.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a conversation script you can use that is not written in product marketing language.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's written like the way a human talks.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if here are some questions you could ask.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And based on this, you should have a succinct set of next steps you can take.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is what we're trying to do.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's on a smaller scale, it's working, but getting that to scale across 5,000 partners is the challenge.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: But what we've I think the like the summarization of all that is I don't think partners need more content.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: They need something that they can use when a customer says, I have a problem.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need they don't need 5,000 pages of here's features.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: They need they need to be able to say a customer has this challenge, how can I solve it with your with your solution set?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's a that's the question that keeps me up at night when I work with our teams.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't own enablement, but I also I want to make sure that the enablement that our team is doing is landing with the partner community that needs it, right?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: They're not all the same.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think it all interconnects listening to what you're saying right now, also about the the partner scoring.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we know that the the enterprise large partner playbook can't just be copied to your, I don't know, niche partners, your SMB partners.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: You need to think outside the box.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think one of the values there, what you just mentioned about using AI tools internally to um assess partners, you're almost looking at intent data.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: And with that, you can also start to kind of tune your enablement to your partners specifically, which will make them feel much more supported in the area that are that they're in, as opposed to saying, wait, this approach doesn't work for me.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have massive enterprise customers, so why are you giving me super complicated indie feature dumps?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And um on top of that, you think about think about an organization like CDW, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: CDW is is a partner of ours that buys through the TSE in the agency model.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: They've got, I don't even know how many salespeople they have, right?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: If I sit down and do a sales train with CDW, it's gotta be at a different level than when I sit down with an agency partner that might be more boutique, that might only have one or two salespeople, but they focus on these larger enterprise deals or they they have a very specific vertical that they work in.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: The the motion I'm gonna use for that smaller group is radically different than I'm gonna use for a CDW or a scan source or um name your larger, like maybe they're on the fringe of being a TSD or an agent, but like those organizations are gonna be treated totally differently in terms of how we treat them.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, which makes sense that that reflects in your uh go-to-market through the channel as well, because channel is is an extra step in that process, right?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's more people, but you're still targeting different types of end customers, which require different types of approaches.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think sometimes that really does get forgotten.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100% agreed.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: The partner is my customer.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was just on a conversation with uh with a couple partners yesterday.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, 8x8 has end customers, but the partner is my customer, and they are all very different and need to be, need to be treated as such.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you're if you as a vendor, if you put all your partners in the same bucket, you probably don't have a very successful partner program.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I hear you.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: I I want to shift a little bit to AI, because obviously uh still and probably forever will be a hot topic.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: Two elements I want to touch on here, because something you said really, really kind of inspired me.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: You were talking about how you use those internal models.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: So you use them for partner insights, uh uh tailored content, et cetera.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I wonder how your partners are reacting to uh 8x8 actually shifting towards this AI-first augmented mindset.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's been super successful.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um when we talk and uh when we talk about AI specifically in this context, we're talking about the sales process, what we're doing internally, not necessarily the product.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's AI all over the product as well, but from an internal standpoint, what what we're doing with AI, um our partner community seems to really, really be resonating with it.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so we do we do two things.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: My my customers are the partners, right?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: But then, like I mentioned, we've also got 70 something thousand end customers, right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um as we as we started realizing how powerful AI was, and we realized we've also got a tremendous amount of data of our own that we can leverage to to make our decision making better.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: We um our our chief transformation officer uh came in and said, All right, we're going to refine the way that we go to market and we're gonna use AI in that sales process.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's a fairly it's a fairly big program overall, but in a nutshell, when we have a a larger deal, and we don't do these for like the smaller single-call closed deals, but uh like a larger deal, a mid-market deal, an enterprise deal.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: When we've got that kind of customer that that is uh you know looking at our solution, we will create an AI-powered value map.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that value map is a living document that's designed to kind of stick with that prospect all the way through step one until after they've been implemented and deployed.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the document just kind of keeps getting updated and um it gets smarter and smarter.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is we start out and we say, all right, my customer is ABC Company.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a uh AI-powered tool, and this bot goes out and we'll grab as much information as we can uh publicly about ABC Company.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then what we'll do is we'll take all of our call recordings and transcripts and interactions and notes from Salesforce and every touch point that we have, and we will insert those into the bot.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll say these are the specific challenges the customer has identified.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: That on its own is a super powerful tool.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And because what can we do is say these are the these are the challenges in order of priority, this is what you ought to focus on, these are other challenges that similar customers in the industry are having, so on and so forth.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: We also will know, hey, they're a publicly traded company.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Here's their latest quarterly earnings, all that info.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then it keeps iterating, right?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So as we keep having meetings with them, we record those conversations, we import that into the value map.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we're also looking at not just that individual customer.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: We've got 70,000 something customers on the eight by eight side.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've got the ability to say, hey, of the customers that are in a similar industry or similar size or whatever else, what other challenges might they be uh highlighting?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: What other products or solution sets might make sense to bring in?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what are the conversation starters that we might use to introduce those concepts?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So now as a salesperson, I've got I've got a singular library that knows everything about that customer.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Hugely important.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got all the knowledge that 8x8 has about our industry and what that customer might be able to do.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the sample size is relatively small, but we've seen our win rates grow by about 15% when we're using the value maps.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it going from about 25 to about 40%.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: When we go through that process all the way, because of that, we're seeing that partners are super excited to share that information with us because it also makes that customer more sticky, right?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: The value map is not designed to say, hey, a customer wants to buy UCAS.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a quote for UCAS.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: The value map is designed to say this customer was asking about some specific challenges on the UCAS side.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here are four or five other CX related applications that totally make sense and that we could build a very easy ROI for.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: We should sell these.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: That makes the value of the deal bigger.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It makes that customer stay in your portfolio longer.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we have we've the partners that we've worked with this on have been extremely, extremely happy um with this process.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it's it it it it was not something that we just snapped our fingers and did overnight.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: This was months, months in the making, and now it's it's now it's an everyday cycle.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, you know, last May or June when we first started this, I think a lot of people were were trying to wrap their arms around it, but now it's it's humming along.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're doing very well.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's a couple interesting points there.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: The first being that it's almost fascinating to marry the old with the new, so using historic data in a super tech forward, modern, AI-driven way to gain new insights for future deals, which I think is just a phenomenal way of looking at your previous data sets.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of companies kind of start at point zero now and then build from there.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but importing your historical data into AI uh tools is a really smart move.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: And and another thing I noticed was this it's almost like account-based marketing, but like account-based channel sales.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: And and I've long sung the praises of account-based marketing and how important it is to actually understand your customer before they even know you because it it makes them feel connected, it makes them feel engaged.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: So uh account-based channel sales, we're uh we're copywriting it here.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I wish I could take credit for coming up with it, but uh I I'm just a I'm a passenger on this journey.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll share the credit.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um so okay, so that's the the internal part of the AI story, right?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I think externally it becomes a bit more complicated, a bit more muddled, because I know that every vendor in your space is also throwing around the term like AI service desk, AI call center, AI customer experience.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: So how are you helping partners kind of build out that message, the 8x8 message, in a way that's actually memorable and differentiated?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um so uh I'll get to the marketing answer in a second.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: But like the the thing that I that I'd say to partners and that I talk about internally is that AI is not the product.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: AI is the force multiplier that improves the interactions and it improves the things that we've already built.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at what we've got from an AI standpoint, it's not Some magic new product that didn't exist and now does a bunch of things.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we look at AI in as things like it it improves our transcription, right?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: When I record a call, we've got, I think our transcription uh error rate is only like 3% or something like that.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the best in the industry.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Gives us that gives us a really solid baseline for how we take action on on those those calls and those interactions.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's not that there's one specific tool, it's that we're we're putting bits of AI all over the product to make it more usable and give it more power for an end user.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that being said, when we talk about going to market with AI, our our approach, at least you know, when you look at AI, when you look at 8x8 space in the market, um, we are not hyping individual feature sets from an AI standpoint.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm not, I'm not talking about voice bots and chat bots, right?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because that is a that is a product, that is a feature set.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's something we offer.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think a lot of the smaller AI companies, the the companies that are that create one specific product, like your well, it's more than one product, but like take a company like Cognity or uh like Observe AI, right?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: They they've got relatively narrow products in the AI space.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they're really, really good at doing that one little thing.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas a vendor like 8x8, or if you look at other vendors that we compete with, Zoom, Ring Central, Dialpad, we've got these AI features, but it's not like one product.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: So um we have to sprinkle in and augment it.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess when you come in and say, hey, it's it's the AI-powered, AI-powered CX, that's everybody's tagline.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: I can't that's not a differentiator.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when we stand out, when I'm trying to communicate with a partner and and stand out, instead of talking about AI features, and this is not a this is not a marketing track, this is more of a this is where it gets hard to scale, right?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of talking about AI features, I'm talking about workflow outcomes.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about improving agent efficiency.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about improving supervisor visibility.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about giving more consistent experiences across customer bases, right?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not bolting AI onto a platform.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're embedding it into this entire CX lifecycle.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I it is a tricky message because it's I mean, what do you say?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're the AI-powered CX company.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it is.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, that's what everybody does.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I guess the the message behind the message is that it's not about product.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's about utilizing AI to make your people more efficient and providing intelligence, providing insights, summarization, automation.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about displacing agents, it's about making the agents you have more effective.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about displacing a piece of technology, it's about making it more efficient and giving the customer a better experience.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it's every customer's got a different challenge, too.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: So this is I wish I had like a one-sentence answer for this is what we do with AI, but it's like it's like asking, what do we do with the internet?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's funny.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think looking at it from a almost like a value-driven outcome perspective makes so much more sense.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I think we're in this interesting point in time now where we still need to talk actively about AI.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you're not talking about it, then people think, what, you don't have AI.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I I it's kind of surprising how often this comes up.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like the transition from on-prem to SaaS.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody was suddenly multi-tenant SaaS, hybrid cloud, this, blah, and they just had like servers running in their basement, right?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it wasn't really anything yet.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: But at one moment, shift became standard.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, of course we've got multi-tenant SaaS.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a click-to-deploy infrastructure.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: You got your your monthly recurring fee, that's it.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: And suddenly I I have no conversations about are you multi-tenant or not?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's no longer a thing.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you you can kind of move the goalposts enough to where it's like, all right, this is now, these are now table stakes.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to have the multi-tenant discussion.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're right.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: You have to address it.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I it's I joke about it because it's like we have to talk about AI, but it's also like, do you need me to walk through a checklist of every single AI function we can do?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because if that's what if you're just trying to build a matrix and compare who's got AI functionality, number one, it's a waste of time.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: And number two, by tomorrow it'll be obsolete, right?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: The market's changing so fast that trying to keep a track of who can do what individual feature set, that I think that's a fool's errand.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: It it should be it should be focused on what are the outcomes I can build as opposed to what are the features.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: But that's like that that statement, focus on outcomes, not features.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's you know, that's solution selling.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been I've been standing on that soapbox for 15 years to try to say, don't worry about the feature set, worry about solving your customers' problems, and we'll worry about the features later.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and that's the thing, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: You you don't really even have to know the features if the solution is doing what you need it to do.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's it.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're having a conversation on a different abstraction level, basically.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there's you also get, and this is now we're getting into my favorite subject, which is like the idea of partner discovery around like how do I uncover these things.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: That that is, and maybe I'm stepping on the question that I think is coming next.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um talking about solutions instead of features and getting someone to focus on what the customer needs instead of what they're asking for is I think the difference between a partner that sells deals and a massively successful partner, right?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because the massively successful partners are the ones that are saying, what is the problem you're trying to solve and why are you trying to do it this way?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they're pushing back.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're not afraid to say, hey, customer, I had a one of my very first customers at 8x8, this was like seven or eight years ago, they wanted, they wanted this blue flashing strobe light in their contact center whenever they had callers waiting in queue.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: And from an engineering side, everyone was like, cool, we can, I can make this happen, right?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: I get to geek out and be an engineer.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: But what we also did is say, why on earth do you need this blue light?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: The customer requirement is a blue light.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the customer need.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the challenge they're trying to solve, right?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the partner, and I won't name names, but the partner also didn't say, hey, why, like, why?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you need this?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: You're asking for a feature.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're asking for a like a weird solution, but why do you want it?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer to the question, why was, oh, well, in the old system, we our agents can only be logged into one queue at a time.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: So if they're sitting in the customer service queue and calls are stacking up in sales, they they're only getting customer service calls.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's problem number one.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Problem number two was they didn't have real-time visibility to their stats.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: But their contact center manager framed it as we need to have a blue flashing light integration so our agents know to jump off the customer service queue and into the sales queue.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, well, I can still give you the blue light, but we can do other things that make this blue light obsolete, right?
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: That you're asking for an answer to a problem that that's not the way to solve this, I guess is the way that I'm saying it, right?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that that mindset of why, is this a good idea?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: You probably shouldn't do it this way and push back against the customer expectation.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because the customer is solving a problem based on the technology that they understand, right?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're solving the problem based on the on the tool that they bought in 2015 that they're still holding together with duct tape.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: So they say, oh, the blue light is the solution that works, instead of saying we need to have better visibility.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I like that mindset and that shift is what it was helpful when we were talking about expanding UC to CX deals.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was helpful when we were talking about expanding CX into WFM deals.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's helpful when we talk about expanding any deal and incorporating AI into the solution.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's what do you like, what is the challenge you're trying to solve?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: If I just throw AI at it, you're gonna have an expensive solution that may or may not solve your problem.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think that's actually great advice, just in general, to people.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like sometimes you need to take a step back and reassess your own ideas, right?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Take take that outside looking in approach, and and I I I actually have a name for this.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: I call it a five-second idea.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's an idea that I come up with that makes me really excited for five seconds before it completely falls apart, right?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think I think we all need to give ourselves kind of the grace to allow ourselves to have those five-second ideas.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Not every idea is an idea worth following.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: And and I'm not a big Simon Sinek fan, but start with why is absolutely perfect advice in all these situations.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Why are you fixing it this way?
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Why is there a problem in the first place?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: What why is it what what like and why do this instead of something else?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this the priority that you're asking us about specifically?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: And without making AI seem like this magic paintbrush, I mean, I can solve almost any problem, right?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I can, based on the technology that we have and that we have with our partner ecosystem, I can probably solve literally any CX problem that's out there.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's as much as I would like to say that that is something unique to 8x8, it's there's probably a lot of vendors that can solve almost any CX problem you have.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: You ha especially when we have the power of AI and the power of uh of the ability to integrate with all these other applications.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it it's it's more a matter of understanding that problem and why is it a problem?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I just if I just went to that customer and and built a blue light for them like they wanted, a year later they'd be like, well, eight by eight, it doesn't work any better than our old platform.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because you you built it just like your old platform.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's not the way to do it.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: But a partner that pushes back on that, a partner that's good that's gonna man, uh undying respect for the partner that is willing to tell a customer that they had that they have a terrible idea, that the way that they want to do it is just terrible.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: A part when a partner says that to a customer, I I I love them.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, that's amazing.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I think the single sentence takeaway for our entire conversation is your blue light might be a red light.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yes.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is not the solution to your problem.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, hey, just looking at the time, I've had a fantastic conversation, and I'm sure we could talk about tech, AI, partner enablement, CX, and all these topics for hours.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I also want to make sure that uh you get the time to wrap this up.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any final insights, tips, or tricks that you'd like to share with the audience?
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I yeah, I I I knew we were gonna talk about this.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, what's what's my last message gonna be?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I I I vacillated between two separate messages.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll say the first one that's kind of tongue-in-cheek.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: First one is in the partner ecosystem, we age in dog ears.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you had an experience with us two years ago, that experience is radically different today than it was two years ago.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's radically different today than it was eight months ago, based on the way our sales process works.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: The product changes, people turn over.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's so much that happens in this space, and especially with AI.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if you say to yourself, oh, I worked with 8x8 in 2020, hey, we're fine.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, give give us another shot.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: That that was a lifetime ago.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but the real answer, the one, the one thing, if I want to communicate with every agency partner, I would say, and I've I've I've you know kind of alluded to this, stop trying to sell what you know and start selling what your customer is trying to fix, right?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you can master discovery and tie CX back to revenue, back to agent retention, back to efficiency in some way, you are going to win deals, and you're gonna win deals that aren't dependent on price, right?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like money is not gonna be an object because you'd be able to build an ROI and be able to say, I can add so much value compared to just selling you a UCAS solution.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the partners who win aren't the ones with the most product knowledge, they're the ones who ask the best questions.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: So keep that in mind, and then also um, I guess selfishly know that 8x8 can probably solve just about any one of those challenges you have.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, those are uh definitely uh words to live by.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: So the last thing we always do is we ask our guests to nominate the next guest for the Partnership Unraveled podcast.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: Who should we have next, Tony?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I again two choices.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um my good friend Kyle Walker works with Zoom.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Kyle knows everybody in the channel, so I would I would reach out to Kyle.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's a good person to talk to in terms of like relationship building, and and he's been on the channel for a long time.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the other person I might mention is our our chief transformation officer uh at 8x8.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: His name's Joel Neeb.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he was the pioneer behind our AI transformation.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that there's I think there's gonna be a lot of partners who'd be very interested in hearing how we've used AI internally to improve our process.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Not a not a product lecture, but like what we're doing internally.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a super fascinating discussion every time you you talk to him.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, awesome.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think this comes back to um we're not unique in that sense, right?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: These best practices, also when it comes to internal transformation, can be super valuable to kind of skill your business, especially in this rapidly changing market.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: So um great nominations, amazing.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, Tony, thank you so much for sharing your insights and taking the time to speak with us.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you, dear listeners, thanks for tuning in and see you in the next episode.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Tony.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Bye, Tony.