Many of us love Zoom and the product seemingly sells itself.
But not only 15-20% of their revenue is ⚡️ powered by 8K+ partners, the company also would’ve focused on #channelpartners earlier given a chance.
💰 Zoom boasted $4.1B revenue in FY22, roughly half of which is Enterprise (they call it “non-online” in contrast with Consumer). This segment is a major growth area, and where partners are essential.
Zoom CRO Ryan Azus: “Partners are the core pillar of how we're going to drive our #growth. We already see tremendous success, we have 8-9000 partners already. Roughly 25-35% of our non-online business comes through partners and we're making major investments in how we continue to increase that.”
🚀 Even before the pandemic, Zoom was rapidly growing due to its superior quality and ease of use. After its launch in 2013 (following 2yrs of dev-t) it acquired 3,5K businesses and 1M customers in just 5 months.
Company was very product centric in the first year, but then successfully combined sales motion with rapid product evolution. This is what allowed Zoom to win in a crowded space.
When Sequoia Capital invested $100M (D, $1Bn val.) in 2016 to turn Zoom into a #platform, the company had 450K businesses as customers.
Zoom later scaled 30X during Covid - from 10m to 300m users.
🎯 But the most interesting is their GTM (explained in 2019):
“Our sales model allows us to efficiently turn a single non-paying user into a full enterprise deployment…55% of our 344 customers that contributed more than $100K of revenue started with at least one free host prior to subscribing. These 344 customers contributed 30% of revenue.”
How do they do that? Combining direct sales and channel.
📈 If you look at their #partnerships graph, you may notice two inflection points:
In 2017 Zoom launched Developer Platform and App #Marketplace. Today users can launch 1.5K apps in the Zoom interface.
In 2020, just before the pandemic, Zoom doubled down on partnerships with the new program. They improved and simplified it in 2022, calling ZoomUp Partner program.
Zoom now has 3 groups of partners to help it grow:
✔️ Go-to-Market Partners
Alliances, Solution Industry Leaders (key product integrations, e,g, CRMs), and Investors & Affiliates (offer Zoom to portfolio companies).
✔️ Sales & Delivery Partners
Help customers to integrate Zoom or refer customer leads to Zoom. Include Distributors, Agents, Solution/Service Providers, Integrators, Resellers and Referrals.
✔️ Technology Partners
Integrate Zoom, build apps for Zoom marketplace or embed Zoom into their apps. Include Hardware Partners, Marketplace Developers and Integrated Software Vendor (ISV).
Today Zoom is trying to capitalize on the growth they captured, shipping 1.5K features/year and effectively competing with MSFT Teams, Slack, etc.
👋 More to be said about Zoom and their #ecosystem - TBC.
Sources: #saastr, IR materials, CROs interviews.
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