A new era of growth: How the Zoom partner ecosystem is evolving

To keep pace with rapid innovation, we’re evolving our Zoom Up Partner Program, expanding our AI-first platform with innovative solutions, and providing robust partner incentives. 2024 has been a year of major investment in our channel team, prioritizing our channel go-to-market initiatives with a simple goal: to make our team an extension of your organization.

Looking ahead to 2025, we’ll continue expanding this team to deepen the support we provide you and operate as an aligned go-to-market team with more integrated execution at every level.

So, what does this mean for you?

Our partner-first mindset is the foundation for driving channel expansion. It enables us to enhance the collective strength of our partners as we go to market with ground-breaking solutions across Zoom Workplace, our AI-first work platform with AI Companion.

We recently introduced new tools and systems designed to facilitate collaboration and accelerate the quoting and ordering process. We’re also simplifying onboarding and streamlining deal registration to remove barriers and give you the support, resources, and opportunities you need to thrive in today's competitive landscape.

As we mentioned at our recent Zoomtopia Partner Connect, our latest enhancements and improvements designed to accelerate our partners’ business are already generating great results: 

• Over 35% increase in approved deal registrations
• Almost 50% reduction in time for deal registration approvals: single-digit hours versus days for many
• 70% of partners surveyed in August have seen an improvement over the last year

We also moved to a new Deal Registration program based on product family registration, dramatically increasing the number of accounts and, therefore, the market opportunity that you can access.

The speed of Zoom is more than just a tagline we use internally; it’s a representation of the rate at which we launch new features and solutions that our users expect, and prefer. This expansion of the platform is anchored by our AI capabilities. Not only do we believe this provides you with growth potential, but that it can help position you to sell into new and growing markets through the expansion of several core products, including: 

• Video conferencing (Zoom Meetings)
• UCaaS (Zoom Phone) 
• CCaaS (Zoom Contact Center) 
• Conversation intelligence (Zoom Revenue Accelerator) 
• AI chatbot/assistant (Zoom Virtual Assistant)
• AI Companion 2.0
• Workvivo

What’s more, industry validation of our strength is hitting full stride, with recent awards and recognition including Gartner® Peer Insights™ (Customers’ Choice, “Voice of the Customer” report for Unified Communications as a Service), Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ (A leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, Worldwide), G2 (Ranked in top 5 out of 50 Best Collaboration and Productivity Products) and CX Today (Highly Commended for Midmarket Contact Center and Use of AI), further highlighting the depth of the Zoom Workplace platform.

In addition to product offerings, we are committed to driving professional services and partner-delivered support contracts. By investing in these areas, we aim to provide our partners with additional revenue streams and deliver even greater value to our customers.

With remote and hybrid work becoming the norm, the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) markets represent a massive area for growth potential. The need for cloud-based, reliable, and scalable solutions has never been greater, providing numerous opportunities for companies to capitalize on this demand.

Because we rely heavily on our partners to drive the expansion of our UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, we’ve realigned our strategy to bring us closer together. Our new single, go-to-market teams have joined all of the Zoom sales motions in each of the regions to help streamline collaboration between our partners, customers, and teammates. We believe this unified approach will enhance the potential success of our partners.

Your success fuels our success. That’s why our new and improved partner program is designed to empower you and reward your investments. Zoom Up provides a robust value exchange of increased rewards that are well-suited to complement your investments in training, selling, and practice development, and can help you differentiate and build your Zoom business. This program continues our commitment to referral transaction partners and opens up exciting possibilities for resellers, distributors, services-only partners, and more. 

Zoom is making a true commitment with enhanced incentives, including: 

• Deal registration kickers to reward business 
• Transaction-level rebates
• Practice-level rebates

(Explore our partnerships and learn more about Zoom Up here)

We’re firm believers in working smarter, not harder, so in addition to more resources and increased channel headcount, we’re working to make it easier for you to find what you need and experience the success you deserve. By revamping our programs and providing new tools and resources, we want to help make it more simple, predictable, and lucrative to do business with us and shorten the path to pipeline and revenue by:

• Adding updated and new accreditations, including Workvivo accreditation and refreshed material on Foundations, Zoom Customer Experience, Zoom WorkPlace
• Providing role-based training and validation of knowledge and skills
• Revamping our deal management tool interface and news deal dashboard for better visibility into your deal lifecycle

As we embark on this exciting new era of growth, I am confident that our collective efforts will help propel Zoom to new heights of success. By embracing every partner, opportunity, person, and voice within our ecosystem, we can unlock new possibilities and drive meaningful change for our customers and communities.

In the months and year ahead we’ll continue to evolve our reseller and referral programs by making Zoom Up as simple and easy to understand as our Zoom products. We’re transforming our systems and tools to help you transact efficiently with Zoom with several enhancements and additions:

• API integration launched via distribution channel
• Budgetary quoting tool
• Revamped Partner Portal 
• Streamlined channel price lists with updated quoting guidelines
• New tools to see your profitability: partner profitability calculator and SPIFF calculator 

The future is bright for us all at Zoom as we move through our new era of growth. We look forward to partnering with our existing and new partners to see what we can achieve together. 

Together, we can shape the future of communication, collaboration, and customer experience.

Not yet a partner? Learn more at https://partner.zoom.us/. 

*Note: AI Companion may not be available for all regions and industry verticals.