(Pictured above: CoreDial’s Alan Rihm on stage at Channel Partners Evolution, Oct. 11.)

When it comes to succeeding in unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS), it’s all about execution.

That’s according to Alan Rihm, CoreDial’s CEO. During his keynote at last week’s Channel Partners Evolution, he spoke about identifying goals that matter, creating a plan to achieve them and proactively executing on that to succeed faster and at greater scale.

In conjunction with CP Evolution, CoreDial launched a range of deployment options for its flagship CoreNexa Contact Center customer engagement platform.

“I like to reference the book “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr; it’s about objectives and key results (OKRs),” Rihm said. “It’s about executing and delivering value to your customers. Certainly go deep and wide into the customers you have, but go get new customers. We’re kind of in the middle of a land-grab strategy because UC is out there; everybody accepts it and there’s lots of providers.”

If you just stay within your current base, then your adjustable market is going be small compared to the rest of the players in the channel, he said.

“And contact center is like table stakes — people have to be talking about contact centers these days, and not just for professional call centers … for actual SMBs and SMEs, the 25-to-500-seat customers that need contact center capabilities,” Rihm said. “If you don’t, somebody will layer it in and take away your customer.”

Partners just getting into UCaaS and CCaaS should start with a horizontal strategy before pursuing a vertical strategy, he said.

“If you’re a channel partner and you have a vertical already, well then that’s great – that’s awesome – because that’s often stickier,” he said. “It’s not just the product or the solution, it’s about your knowledge of that customer’s business and their need of how they use the technology — so verticals are better. But it’s also hard to build that vertical knowledge, so often if a partner’s just getting into it, start horizontal. Focus on size and geography. And then you start to be good at that. And the next thing you know you build vertical specialties.”

Start with a few customers in the same industry, such as insurance or finance, and then start to build that vertical discipline, Rihm said.

“Then set your marketing materials up and go after additional people like that,” he said. “Now it’s not just the value of the product or service increasing, it’s about your knowledge of their business.”