Curt Allen is Vonage SVP and Channel Chief. He's also a relatively new hire, as well as someone who's taken a less traditional route to get to where he is today. Allen has nearly two decades of experience practicing what he preaches if you will. In a recent sit-down with Allen, he gave me some insight into the very role he feels he spent his career preparing for.
He was a partner and part-owner of a master agency, which was eventually sold back in 2016. The irony of where he is today is that when Vonage came to market, his agency was one of the first partners to sign up to sell the company's hosted voice telephony systems. Before that, he worked in the collaboration business for what is now Intrado, where he ran the partner and reseller channel.
"My background is as a partner first, which is how I make my decisions now as Vonage Channel Chief, thinking, how will this impact our partners?"
Vonage has evolved its channel program over the past few years and put a heavier focus on the channel as a primary go-to-market strategy, I'm told. He says his role is to pour gas on what his predecessor started, the momentum toward evolving the channel into a primary means of sales.
Today there's a breadth of new delivery models, like the Vonage Communications Platform - a powerful combination of unified communications, contact center solutions, and communications APIs - all built on a flexible, integrated unified platform. "We want to find the partners within our scope who want to evolve with the channel and those who have the innovative appetite to sell our solutions."
In total, Allen told me Vonage has thousands of commissionable partners it works with across the globe but added - the company's always looking for new and eager participants so they can move up-market with the Vonage team. Allen says he hopes he can more than double the number of active partners Vonage works with during his tenure with the company. COVID-19 has affected the channel community, according to Allen. "Many were used to selling in person, but COVID-19 has forced us all to find new ways to stay connected and continue to do business.
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Curt Allen[/caption]
