Deep dive interview with Zoom

MSPs all across the globe have been able to share in Zoom’s phenomenal growth by selling products such as Zoom Phone; a leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, Worldwide.

From excellent customer satisfaction to keeping up with your customers’ evolving needs, to providing you with a scalable and trusted communication offering – Zoom Phone has it all.

So where does intY come into this, and how can our Agency Model help you be part of the next 2 million seats reached by Zoom Phone?

As a Master Agent, we allow partners to access amazing new revenue streams with ease. The Agency Model is a customer referral model where you introduce your customer to a vendor, the vendor will quote, deploy and bill your customer directly, whilst you benefit from a one-off incentive bonus for qualifying deals, plus a monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the service.

Key Benefits of the Agency Model are:

• Access to leading Unified Communication and Network providers
• You can have a more vendor agnostic approach, without the need to lose out on deals because you aren’t upskilled on a particular vendor product
• Vendors do all of the hard work, including the sales process, deployment, invoicing and support
• Lucrative model allowing you to have more time to focus on selling

Amy Smith, Agency Lead and Account Director at intY says:

“The Agency Model is a lucrative model giving MSPs the opportunity to work alongside the vendor to help them close sales. Freeing up time to focus on making referrals whilst taking away the pains of upskilling technical support, sales and billing. With the support of the vendor, the partner can sell into larger organisations, new verticals and new products.”

Want to get to know Zoom a little better?

Meet their Zoom Phone Specialist – David Napier.

We are joined by David Napier, a Zoom Phone Specialist who will be talking about the amazing benefits this solution has to offer.

David, what is Zoom Phone and how can it aid businesses?

“Zoom Phone is an agile feature-rich cloud phone system for businesses of all sizes. It is simple and intuitive, allowing you to experience the look and feel of Zoom meetings but with the enterprise-class features. As your customer’s business grows, Zoom Phone can grow alongside them with trusted communications and built-in reliability.”

Zoom is fully functional video first UCaaS platform. Please could you elaborate?

“It means that Zoom want to tie together the various work streams that allow us to communicate effectively throughout the business (and sometimes personal) day and ultimately drive the efficiency of your business model forward. This ranges from chat & presence, with integrations into your document management systems to allow historic content to be more easily searched; all the way through to actual media escalation into feature rich video or voice calls. All of which have one, been built internally rather than having grown through acquisition, and secondly sit under one easy to use application with a single pane of glass portal for managing all aspects of this diverse product.”

How did you come to be involved with Zoom Phone?

“I initially started within the Commercial Acquisition team at Zoom. With a background in telecommunications and UCaaS platforms. As soon as I understood that Zoom Phone was being launched, I understood the full value proposition that this would bring to us as an organisation and so immediately began my transition into the Zoom Phone Team.”

What is your role in the business?

“My role is to be a Specialist. This is not limited to bringing specific technical capabilities in regard to Phone but also leveraging my previous experience at Zoom to be an overall platform specialist. Above and beyond this, the expectation is for us to all be Sales specialists as well in terms of managing sales cycles. Ultimately, I am a resource for the wider AE community to leverage, to drive their opportunities forward more successfully.”

What does this mean for the Channel?

“It means that above and beyond the excellent work they will be doing in terms of onboarding Zoom accreditations and trainings, my team and I will be an additional resource to the Channel to ensure that the full Zoom proposition can be positioned correctly. We are a fulcrum point for obtaining quick access to all of the relevant resources required for effective initial engagement and discovery, through to deploying effectively and time driven POCs with clear and succinct success criteria. Again, our role here is to take the great work that everyone is already doing, but to drive it forward into shorter sales cycles and allow us all to generate more revenue.”

What are the advantages of having a Zoom partner community and what can you achieve with them?

“I’ve had great experiences working within our Partner community. The advantage of already existing relationships can never be underestimated. If we can take these relationships and approach these customers through a unified approach where we can all leverage our key areas of expertise, there should be no limit to what we can achieve with our customers and Partners.”

What are your most successful sales techniques?

“The answer here may be a bit of a non-answer. Our strongest technique is the strength and value of the platform, in its own right. Beyond that our most effective strategy has been to tie down a consistent sales approach from discovery through to managing a tight POC and ultimately ensuring that we are engaged with the correct stakeholders and decision makers.

Doing all of these things in tandem have allowed us to bring our average sales cycle down significantly, especially in an area of business that historically resulted in sales cycles that can drag from 6 – 12 months. In the Mass Market / Commercial segment space, our average sales cycle is under 2 months, meaning you could be starting conversations halfway through the Quarter with a realistic view to closing that business within the existing Q.

Those with previous experience in this segment will know that these are very aggressive timelines. Beyond that, our customer retention and NPS scores show that we also take the time to deploy and implement our solution effectively to start making real changes in our customer business immediately.”

What are your top tips for utilising everything that Zoom has to offer users?

“My top tips for deploying and utilising Zoom would be to leverage the huge amount of resources that we make available as part of the base license fees. We include Customer Success Managers both for the core platform and Phone add-on elements. This team will ensure swift kick-off meetings to map out against your deployment goals. They assist with setup, migration, porting, training (both admin and end user). Beyond this we have a huge collateral data base with how to guides and videos and the ability to sign up to weekly live training sessions on all aspects of our platform.”

How is Zoom Phone changing communication for businesses?

“Zoom Phone is revolutionising communication in businesses by taking something that has historically required large teams of telephony experts to deploy over long timelines, into something that is powerful, effective, but more importantly easy to deploy and manage from a single point globally.

Our reliability and uptime is industry leading and in true Zoom fashion our strength shines through in our ability to deliver high quality media in particularly low bandwidth environments. This has never been more important than in our current hybrid working model where many employers are having to rely on their employees home network coverage.”

How will you ensure that Zoom Phone is safe for users and their data?

“Zoom Phone leverages TLS 1.2 encryption to ensure the integrity of each data packet. In addition, we have all of the security elements on site at each of our Data Centres – the full details of which can been seen through our SOC II report.

All of our global data centres are GDPR compliant. By default, Zoom creates and stores their customer accounts and data in their US data centres however, we understand that many organisations will have additional compliance requirements that dictate that they utilise in region data centres for data at rest retention.

Zoom now allows for customers to elect their local SIP zones and specify where all their data at rest is stored. This covers off everything from chat, recordings, voicemails etc. (This does not limit your ability to utilise our full global network from a data in transit perspective and to again ensure you get the best user experience and quality but with the peace of mind that you know where all of your data at rest is stored).”

How can users integrate Zoom Phone into their existing communication set up with other applications, such as Microsoft Teams?

“Zoom has a number of ways to integrate into Teams, with a growing list of items to tie this bond closer and closer together. We already have the capability to provide media escalation for both meetings and video directly from within the Teams application. This can be done through ad hoc escalation inside of either your teams or channels.

Additionally, we also effectively embed the Zoom application into the Teams client. This reduces training and adoption timelines as it allows them to retain the knowledge they already have within Teams and provide an easy way to escalate into higher quality video or voice calls. We are driving these integrations forward further. At Zoomtopia we recently announced a way to tie the chat platforms together so that you can be sending a chat message in Teams and have that same message received within the Zoom application and vice versa.

Additionally, Microsoft have recently announced that they intend to release the federation APIs for Teams by December which would allow us to develop a single presence that works seamlessly between the two platforms. Again it means that existing Teams customers can utilise Zoom for best in breed media escalation without needing to compromise on the work methodologies they have already been used to utilising.”