What Happened:
Zoom is pushing aggressively into the contact center market. Knight says partners must evolve from “how many rooms do you have?” transactional conversations to deeper solution selling grounded in business outcomes.
Brand trust created pre-orders for Zoom Contact Center before it even launched. The brand had enoughloyalty that partners committed to the CCaaS product before a single customer was live.
Customer FOMO around AI is now so strong that partners are being inundated with “we need AI” requests. Zoom responded by building a hands-on value-selling video library, live trainings, and playbooks to help partners understand agentic AI, productized digital twins, and practical use cases.
These insights were discussed during Desai’s conversation on the Partnerships Unraveled podcast by Channext.
Our Take:
When Zoom announced its contact center product, partners didn't request detailed feature comparisons or extensive proof points. They ordered based on the assumption that if Zoom built it, "it's probably going to be like everything else we have from them. It's going to be easy, and it's going to just work."
This brand trust originated from a specific strategic decision during the pandemic. While four other companies competed for remote meeting dominance, Zoom prioritized ease of deployment over feature depth. That choice created a moat.
Knight makes a compelling case that partner lifetime value deserves more attention than customer lifetime value in channel-led businesses. "That's more than one customer, right? Because it's every customer that comes off that partner," he explained. "But secondly, partners can iterate both the product and the go-to-market."
Zoom initially spent significant time crafting AI messaging for partners to take to market. But the messaging effort became obsolete almost immediately because customer demand arrived before partner readiness. "The script flipped. The customers were jumping up and down, raising their hand," Knight said. Partners found themselves reverse-engineering their AI knowledge to meet existing demand rather than creating demand through education.
Zoom responded by overhauling its enablement approach. The company built hands-on training sessions, bite-sized value-selling videos, and practical guides that show partners how to translate abstract AI demand into real discovery questions, use cases, and deal motions.
How far this shift takes Zoom’s ecosystem is a question the coming months will answer.
Listen to the full interview with Knight here.