The events of the past 18 months have “re-energised” Mitel’s approach to remain relevant to partners, according to Nick Riggott, Country Sales Director for the UK&I.
The cloud comms provider recently revamped its Global Partner Program in order to accommodate the massive changes its channel ecosystem has experienced since the beginning of last year.
The refreshed programme recognises and rewards the role partners play in the customer communications lifecycle by introducing new resources, training, tools, and incentives that reflect the accelerated market demand for cloud and fuels partners’ ability to capitalise on it.
“The goal of our continued investment in the programme is to help partners strengthen customer relationships, while also making it easy for them to maximise revenue and to grow their business,” Riggott explained to UC Today.
“Before, it was very much focused on what would traditionally have been the heartland of Mitel’s business, which was more of a UC, capex, on-prem model, driven towards capability, spend, and training. But now, it’s about reflecting the massive shift we’ve seen in terms of how our communications and UCaaS and CCaaS solutions have evolved over the last 18 to 24 months”
As part of the new programme, partners will receive points and recognition for going “above and beyond” minimum certification criteria to achieve advanced sales and technical competencies.
Other benefits of the programme are a new Customer Lifecycle Engagement Certification designed to support partners in their overall management of customers throughout the customer lifecycle. The certification focuses on software assurance renewals, retention efforts, as well as supporting customers in their technology modernisation initiatives, from ensuring organisations are leveraging the latest release and features to guiding their migration to cloud or subscription offerings. This offering will be available later this year.
“We’re also making continual investments and funds and budget available to ensure that this is not where it stops,” Riggott continued.
“Our continual drive is to make sure that we retain relevance for our partners and that we enable them to position communications or contact centre or CX solutions successfully to their end users. To do that, we need to make sure that our programme fits their go to market approach.
“This programme is what we believe to be the right mechanism for our partners moving forward. It’s an evolving document that has to meet the success criteria of the partners at every step of their journey.”
The tumultuous events of the past 15 months offered Mitel the opportunity to consider how to ensure their solutions remain relevant with partners and end users, particularly around the hybrid working model, Riggot said.
“The biggest challenge is around maintaining the mobility capability to go into the hybrid workplace and ensuring that they’ve got those solutions that can work on any device, in any location with any application, as well as making sure they’re completely integrated with all the new systems that organisations are going to need to deploy as they go forward,” he elaborated.
“Going into January of this year we changed our entire business model in the UK, because we had to completely adjust to the market demand. We’d operated in a very consistent way for probably eight to 10 years, but we’ve pivoted our entire partner-aligned sales resources in the UK because we had to put more into the partner, so we’re very keen to make sure we walk the talk”
Earlier this year, Mitel launched the MSP-focused MiCloud Connect Partner Managed model to help partners increase cloud adoption in the US and Canada. It gives certified partners more control over service delivery and management while boosting an MSP’s ability to sell cloud services to their customers.
The solution began to be piloted with UK partners in May and is expected to become generally available in the country from August, Riggott said, followed by rollouts in France and Germany.
“It’s the biggest game-changer we have in the market,” he stated.
“We’ve got an incredibly loyal partner community that reciprocate investment, it’s all about engagement and partnership, and we need to reflect that with the go to market capability that Connect needs to deliver in the UK.”
