While LiveVox has been around for years, their channel is really less than a year old, and the new partner program is designed both to attract quality new partners and to get new and existing partners up to speed.
MeiLee Langley, Senior Director, Channel Marketing at LiveVox
Cloud contact centre provider LiveVox is extremely new to the channel. They are working aggressively on scaling it up however. To this end, they have announced the availability of their new ACTivate channel program, which is ready to go now, and which will be further enhanced to built out more partner demand generation tools.
“While some of the companies we compete against have been selling through channel partners for years, we basically just got into the channel last August,” said MeiLee Langley, Senior Director, Channel Marketing at LiveVox. “Our channel basically started with one employee, Angelo Benigno, who was really the Director of Strategic Alliances. He built out the original program. He brought in Telarus and Intellisys and got contracts signed, but he was just one person.”
Things really began to pick up last summer.
Dan DeLozier came in later in June as the head of global channel and then I and three channel managers came in July and August,” Langley indicated. “A national accounts manager and a marketing person followed, and then the final two channel managers in November.” Langley herself has an extensive background on the channel side of the UCaaS and CCaaS spaces, having come from Nextiva, with previous tenures that include 8×8 and RingCentral.
“We are starting to get our name out there and get recognized in the channel,” Langley said.
Langley said that while LiveVox is new to the channel, their product is well suited to it.
“LiveVox is an omnichannel cloud contact centre with a strong AI component,” she stated. “Where we are really successful is our outbound engine as well as compliance, where we are an industry leader. Because we started in the finance collection space, our outbound regulation is compliant under the TCPA [Telephone Consumer Protection Act], where calls must be human initiated.
“Our appeal in channel beyond these outbound and compliance issues is that we work very well in a ‘land and expand’ approach,” Langley noted. “Partners do not have to unseat a core contact center incumbent with us. They can sell an AI product or analytics and enhance the customer’s existing product with smaller pieces. Then after the customer has seen what we can do, it opens up the ability of expanding in the future at some point. It’s an easier point of entry for partners, and a shorter sales cycle up front.”
While LiveVox’s minimum requirements are around 50 agents or 250 employees, their sweet spot is really the lower enterprise and upper midmarket.
“We now have seven master agents, five of which are new to LiveVox,” Langley said. “We have 144 sub-agent partners bringing us opportunities consistently, and we are looking to triple the number of active subagents.” Today, LiveVox operates in the U.S. and Canada only, but they do have plans to expand internationally.
The ACTivate partner program is designed not only to get partners using Livevox for more things, but to build the LiveVox brand further in the channel, and increase percentage of channel sales, which unsurprisingly given the channel’s newness, remains fairly low.
“One of our biggest goals is to get the ACTivate partner program into the market, which we have now done, to get partners enabled on the program,” Langley said. “That lets them increase the capacity in which they can use us. It will also make sure that we maximize capacity with our Master Agents, which is especially important given that five of the seven are new partners. We want to really align well with their teams. At the simplest level, the goal is to get the LiveVox name out there with partners, and to build trust against competitors who have been in the channel for years, so that they will lead with us.”
The program includes what partners expect as basic table stakes, including a single pane of glass partner portal, a custom onboarding experience to ensure that partners get the right solution sets, pre- and post- sales support through assigned regional channel teams and sales specialists, and a partner field marketing team to build and manage partner marketing plans, strategies, and events.
“The partner program and portal are ready to go today, and launched this week, with full onboarding and training,” Langley stated. “We will enhance it further in building out a bigger set of demand generation tools for the partners.”
Langley concluded by emphasizing that the ACTivate program will empower partners through action.
“We are not just going to talk the talk,” she said.
