New Zoom Channel Chief Mark Jenkins On Transformation And Evolving From A ‘One-Dimensional’ Partner Program

‘I think you’ll also see a tone change from my team on just being more vocal, noisy, celebrating our wins and celebrating those partners who do cool things with us and really demonstrating our value to the market,’ Mark Jenkins, Zoom’s new channel chief, tells CRN.

Videoconferencing giant Zoom Video Communications shares a lot of characteristics from the startup world. The company saw monumental growth during the pandemic and since Zoom has already “landed” with many customers, the company has been working on “expanding,” according to Mark Jenkins, Zoom's new head of global channels and alliances.

Specifically, Zoom is building out its business and offering new services to customers through the channel, which has become a major priority for the company in recent years as a route to market. Zoom was doing about 10 percent of its business through the channel prior to the pandemic, which quickly climbed to about 30 percent by 2022. Now, certain segments of the San Jose, Calif.-based company’s business are even higher. Zoom’s contact center business, for example, is being driven by partners, with more than half of that business coming in through the channel. Jenkins has plans to move those figures even higher as the company adds new and different kinds of partners to its ecosystem, while continuing the momentum with its existing partners.

Jenkins moved into the global channel chief seat in February after spending the past two years in the company’s channel organization, first as head of global systems integrator partners and then head of strategic alliances. Before his time with Zoom, Jenkins spent more than six years building out his security expertise at Palo Alto Networks where he most recently served as general manager of strategic global systems integrators.

Jenkins replaces Todd Surdey, who left the company in October for CrowdStrike.

Jenkins said he sees a lot of similarities between Zoom and Palo Alto Networks. Both companies have seen rapid growth and international expansion in recent years as each one began as a product company and shifted to a platform company, he said. Jenkins said this has laid the groundwork for him to identify “what good looks like” as a tech company goes through a major transformation.

He’s taking that knowledge and experience into his new role as global channel chief. “It gives me a great springboard to work from,” Jenkins said in an interview with CRN.

Jenkins spoke with CRN about his priorities for Zoom’s channel, the buy-in he’s getting from the company’s leadership team, AI, and what partners can expect.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

What is your first set of priorities as Zoom’s channel chief?

A lot of the priorities that we have to work on this year are really around the transformation of our processes, our systems and our ways of working. First of all, we want to continue to work with the partners that love working with Zoom. We really want to embrace those partners and bring them even further along in this journey. Some of them have been selling Meetings and Phone, and now have this opportunity to go into these other portfolio elements like Workvivo and Contact Center, so really growing that base of what those partners can do with us is priority No. 1. Priority No. 2 is we know that there are partner types that we’ve not really worked or engaged with before—systems integrators, service providers, solution providers, distribution partners—so we are taking steps to evolve that mix of partners. Across how we build and win deals [and] how we deploy deals with our customers, with our partners, we know there are different partner types that we need to engage with. The third area is what I call ‘how we work.’ We are moving to a regional model [and] we’re adding new head count. Being able to bring consistency through the customer life-cycle journey with Zoom, through the partner life-cycle journey, from planning, to execution, to marketing—really bringing that consistency is important. The fourth area is how we scale. So, think of all the systems overhauls that we’re doing. The enablement programs—we’ve seen a big uptake over the last year in accreditations and partners really leaning in and investing with Zoom, so we want to continue to grow that. We’ve got a lot more work to do, particularly around services, competencies and helping others build a practice with Zoom.

[Another] area is what I call ‘who we are.’ It’s about how we evolve as a team, how we add skills to the folks who already work here and help them build their careers, how we add new talent into the organization, particularly in the areas we’re going with contact center. And lastly, we want to engage our partners in our culture. We’d love to see partners coming to us with like-minded work on charity events or engaging in our communities.

How will taking a more regional approach help Zoom grow its channel business?

It’s really about what I would call bringing an integrated go-to-market motion to the customer. We’ve now got our sales leadership, our channel leadership and our marketing leadership really aligned around a common reason, a common set of goals, and that’s really allowed us to accelerate in lots of different areas. If you think about now those folks being really under one sort of umbrella, it just cuts down decision-making, allows us to be more nimble, and actually takes advantage of the strengths that we have. So, if we’re doing a marketing event, can we do that with a partner? If we’re doing a sales activity, how can we leverage the power of the channel to help us with that?

Part of the reorganization that we’ve completed recently was to build on top of the activities that we’ve been doing for the last 12 months. We have dedicated resources in our distribution practice, in our SI practice and in our resale practice. We’re working with some of the larger technology companies [like] Twilio and AWS. Part one was getting some of those initial seeds in the ground on establishing those relationships. Now we feel like we’re in a place where we can really start to activate those, and the next six months is really about bringing those early seeds through into real life now and be able to have the right approach, the right head count, the right ways of working to get them activated and producing with us in a kind of meaningful way.

How is your background in security helping you in your new role with Zoom?

That background has given me a lot of strengths. Zoom is taking the security of our customers incredibly seriously, so it’s really good to be able to talk about customer managed keys and all these technical terms that we’re offering. But more broadly, the security space is hyper-competitive. It’s got a lot of different vendors, and so to thrive in that world you have to be able to focus on business outcomes. You have to be able to drive a very technical sale but have ROI and TCO in mind. I think my observations on the UCaaS and the CCaaS industry is it tends to be a little bit of a smaller competitive pool with bigger players, and I think we’ve got some opportunities now to kind of bring that TCO, that ROI mindset to our customers and to our partners because now we’ve got this position of strength with the platform. I think that’s the area where we see customers are saying, ‘Wow, I didn’t know I could consolidate four, five, six or 10 solutions onto Zoom’ and that’s what I saw at Palo Alto Networks as a very effective strategy for that land and expand model that we often talk about and use that buzzword. It’s starting to really happen now in our industry, which is exciting.

After being an early leader in the videoconferencing space during the pandemic, how is Zoom standing out in the collaboration market today?

If you look at the areas where Zoom thrives, one is around the employee experience—the productivity discussion. We now have a very rich suite of tools that really set both that foundation and the upper levels of that digital communication story. Then obviously, in the customer experience area, I think we’re really going from strength to strength. The product is getting to a point where we’re able to access all types of customer conversations, whether it’s help desk, or it’s a complete contact center transformation, we’re starting to win those deals. When we look at Virtual Agent and some of the AI capabilities we’re bringing in there, I think the AI piece really opens up lots of opportunity across both of those stacks and allows us to get into more industry solutions as well. I think you’ll see this year, whether it’s transformation in retail, or transformation in banking, or even down into things like oil and gas, if you’ve got an engineer out on the frontlines looking at how to fix a piece of machinery and they get stuck, we can have them call back for help. We don’t need to send an engineer 3,000 miles unless they really need to be there. So I think there’s lots of opportunities here to redefine where partners and where customers will see value from Zoom moving forward.

How much of an impact will AI have on Zoom’s portfolio?

There’s a lot more to come from the AI story, [and] it’s already having a huge impact. We really see our approach as highly disruptive. We’re including AI Companion in our paid licenses, so customers [don’t] pay extra for AI. We’ve got … millions of meeting summaries coming through, as just one example. The road map I’m seeing from the team is very, very exciting.

Obviously throughout the year, we’ll continue to grow that, and I think the most [important] thing to do with AI is you really need to be in the cloud. It’s very hard to do AI on-prem and there’s not really a good solution out there for that. My point there is, I think for customers, the fact that Zoom already is a SaaS-delivered solution, it gives them that ability to get on board with that transformation more easily. For partners, they can actually use Zoom really as an innovation leader for helping clients not just with Zoom, but we provide a pull-through for other things as well that they might want to do around digital or business transformation. So we think Zoom is in a really good place with our AI story. We’ve added a lot of resourcing … around driving those efforts forward. We’ve been in this space for a long time and there’s lots of things that we can already bring to bear and more to come there as well.

What changes can partners expect from the program this year?

Our Zoom Up 2.0 launch, [which] has been kind of a rolling launch over the course of the calendar year, was really designed around a few different themes. The Zoom of old, I would say, was probably more of a one-dimensional model. We had a range of discounts and approaches that did not give a lot of differentiation to partners and was really designed at a time when Zoom was only a meetings company. Working with that baseline and realizing both where we are and where we’re going, we needed to evolve that program to meet really the places where we needed to differentiate. Then we had what I would call a fairly classic metals model—Gold, Silver and Platinum—that gives partners the opportunity to differentiate as they invest in skills and as they grow their base of business working with Zoom, they will move up through those levels and as a reward we will give them extra differentiation both in how they work with us, extra coverage, MDF and some other benefits. But they’ll also get better pricing that they can then pass through into their business. We also moved from a very, one-time sign-up to customer and you had that customer for life—which we will continue to honor—but we are adding the ability to then work with other partners as they engage with different buyer personas. We’ve seen typically the buyer for UCaaS is very different from the buyer for contact center. Previously, we did not provide as many opportunities as we would like for a partner who may have sold in one part of the portfolio. Then we are making, I would say, a healthy pivot toward adding extra benefits for partners who bring deals to Zoom and then also providing partners with ways to stay engaged in our business that we’ve generated. So to me, this really starts to cover a lot of the bases that we were not really able to without this new program. There’ll be more to come. We’re going to be adding a lot more opportunities for partners around … managed services capabilities. So as we look to maybe the second half of the year, there’s a lot more to come on the services side and that will really give us a chance to demonstrate to those partners that the license transaction is really only one of many components that they can access as they work with Zoom.

What are your goals for your first year as channel chief?

We’ve got a great base of existing partners. The goal that we have is to really bring them on this next journey as we move into these different practice areas [and] help them build their business with Zoom. As we evolve in the area of really enabling partners around training and certification, we’ve got a big push on ease of doing business. We’re adding resourcing. We now have what I would call ‘complete alignment’ with our leadership team, with our IT leadership team, with our product team on building new capabilities for partners to pick up and use APIs for quoting, licensing, provisioning and adding in things for managed services—that’s a big key area as well. There’s a real sense that there’s momentum in our leadership team and in our sales leadership team, in particular. The team is very keen to demonstrate that we’re moving toward the channel-first mindset across our business. We’ll continue to look for ways to be more vocal externally, with the same voices that are saying this internally.

I think it’s also a time for us to build on our strengths. We had very good financial results over the last year. That gives us the ability to leverage our strengths. I think we’re in an industry right now where there are competitors facing challenges, market forces that are driving different demands of infrastructure, of approaches of working, of consolidation of spend. We feel like the time is ours this year to really go after that in a much more, perhaps aggressive way. So, I think you’ll also see a tone change from my team on just being more vocal, noisy, celebrating our wins and celebrating those partners who do cool things with us and really demonstrating our value to the market.