Top Gun 51 Profile: Andy Dignan on Refocusing Five9 Partner Priorities

This post was originally published on this site

Two years ago, Andy Dignan left Cisco to join Five9, the cloud contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider. Tapped as SVP of professional services, Dignan was among several Cisco alums who decided to reunite with Rowan Trollope. Five9 had recruited Trollope, who led Cisco’s collaboration and applications group, to take over as CEO in May 2018. Less than a year after Dignan’s arrival, Five9 promoted him to SVP of global channels and services.

Five9’s Andy Dignan

Five9 began expanding its go-to-market efforts with the launch of a channel program in 2016. Dignan, a veteran of the contact center industry, has accelerated Five9’s to tap the growing shift to CCaaS.

Introduced last year, the Top Gun 51 recognizes premier leaders in the indirect IT and telecom channel. The criteria includes advocacy for the channel and commitment to partners’ business success. There’s also dedication to earning the channel’s trust.

Chosen by a panel of distributors, master agents and industry analysts for this year’s Top Gun 51 list, Channel Partners spoke with Dignan last week. The following are some highlights, edited for clarity.

Channel Partners: What has changed since joining Five9 two years ago?

Andy Dignan: When we joined two years ago, we were at $270 million in annual revenue and our stated goal is to get to $500 million by the end of 2021. We’re on track for that and have had great growth. But when I joined the company, the channel and our partner go-to-market was immature. It was largely built as a direct business. But obviously, to go from $270 million to $500 million and then ultimately $1 billion, which is where we want to go, the only way to do that is to scale through partners. That was a big reason why Rowan, who understood that, came to Five9 as our CEO and brought in some of us, including myself, to take this to the next level.

Channel Partners: Where is it now?

AD: We need to accelerate the growth of our partner and channel business. Overall, we should come up this year, hopefully, around $90 million in channel business specifically. But if you look at our channel business, it includes our reseller business and our master agents. But I also have responsibility for our global systems integrators such as Deloitte, Accenture, etc. And then we also have our ISV partners, as well as our technical partners from an alliance perspective, like Google, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc. If you look at our overall partner business, we’re tracking toward anywhere from 50-60% of our partners influencing sales. And overall, that’s a high percentage of our partner business. We’re just getting started in terms of scaling the channel business, but right now, early results, things are going well.

CP: What are some of the programmatic changes you have made?

AD: We realized that we needed to move away from focusing on the volume of partners. We had around 120 partners under contract, but not many who did more than $1 million in ACV. Ultimately, to get scale, we didn’t need a lot of partners; we just needed higher quality partners doing a higher volume of business. So the strategy was to take a step back and target high-quality partners. We built a team under Jake Butterbaugh, [VP of channel sales], to target and bring on bigger resellers like the AT&Ts and the CDWs of the world. Last year, we had 11 partners that did over $1 million in ACV. And this year, I believe we have 32 partners that will do over $1 million.

CP: How much impact has AT&T had in terms of helping raise your profile in the partner community?

AD: It certainly raised the visibility, within the investor community and with a lot of partners. AT&T didn’t just sign on to be a reseller, but to be a true white-label solution, where they’re bringing it, with AT&T and with the Five9 brand on it. It raised our …