In 4Q 2022, a number of UCaaS providers including Nextiva let a lot of people go. 8×8 let its CEO go. Zoom let their president go. In the last three years there has been a lot of musical chairs at UCaaS providers.
It takes 3 years for a strategy to be executed in the channel. Most execs don’t even get 2 years.
It takes time to communicate the strategy and the plan. More time to get buy in from the managers and partners. This needs regular communication.
Communication up and down the ladder. The managers are more worried about closing orders (quota) than about talking about product advances or other initiatives.
When Webex adds dozens of features, how would the Buyers or Sellers even know? The press release doesn’t do a good job. The slide deck is awful, so how do the stories get carried down to the partners who educate the Buyers about what is available?
Webinars will get you a subset of the partners, but is that the subset of actual Sellers? or the subset of people who like to take webinars to feel busy?
The strategy is important but the communication plan is just as important. Marketing internally is just as important as externally.
I am guessing that there is a lot of pressure on UCaaS providers because since the pandemic “ended”, the stock prices have dropped alongside the year over year growth. Scrambling to hit double digit growth.
NICE InContact just hit 1M cloud agent seats after acquiring InContact in 2016 for almost $1B. Seven years to add about 800K seats. See how hard it is? [My guess is that revenue is about $1.5B from those seats annually.]
Zoom hit 5.5M phones and full FY2023 total revenue of $4.393 billion, up 7% year over year. Monthly churn declined from 3.8 to 3.4%! Zoom also loses money every quarter, but at least they have new products to show for it. The rest of the field needs to up its innovation game!
Weave had full year total revenue of $142.1 million, up 23% year-over-year for 2022, but like RingCentral operate at a huge loss. BTW, the average revenue per customer office is about $550 per month. Weave has added payment and insurance verification to its platform to add value for its customers – and be sticky!
RingCentral is betting on the channel for growth since more than half its sales come in from indirect. RNG also stated that CCaaS ARR is now at $300M. FY2022 revenue is $1.9B up 25% YoY. This number used to be 34-38%.
Crexendo went from OTC to NASDAQ and swapped out CEOs. CXDO was suppoed to release the 4Q numbers yesterday but I can’t find them. The prezos on their IR site are from 2019 and 2020. It makes my head hurt. They are at 3M users on netsapiens. Skyswitch is about a quarter of that. The other 120+ providers make up the other 75%. Pareto proven again.
As I wrote last time, it is getting harder to move UCaaS seats. That’s all for now. Off to Nashville for FISPA to talk about building a sales team in one session and how to get customers to switch platforms in another.
SIDE NOTE:
I find it funny that they all use ARR instead of MRR to demonstrate numbers, which may or may not actual happen, since businesses change (go broke, stop paying, move, or projects don’t complete so the estimated ARR of $1000 ends up being $750 a la Avaya accounting.)