#CHARMONY Is Channel Harmony

Working with customers or partners, Conversica’s ethos is very much in line with the classic Jerry Maguire quote, “Help me, help you.” We genuinely enjoy helping our customers achieve their goals and grow their businesses.

But we also go beyond our direct customer base to assist our partners—and our partners’ customers—to establish “channel harmony” or #CHARMONY. I can’t take credit for the portmanteau, however. That honor goes to my former mentor Hugh Tucker who impressed upon me that partnerships succeed because of the relationships, not because of contracts.

Channel harmony is at the core of our rapidly growing and very successful industry-leading partner ecosystem. Here’s what CHARMONY looks like at Conversica.

Help Us, Help You

A little over a year ago, I stepped into a new role at Conversica focused on accelerating our already thriving partner ecosystem. One of the most important questions for me to answer was: “How Conversica can build and continue to grow the largest—and most successful—partner ecosystem for intelligent automation and Revenue Digital Assistants (RDAs)?”

The key is all about listening to our partners and addressing their needs in a collaborative and constructive way.

We genuinely want to help—and love to help—our customers and partners. But it’s a two-way street. Personally, I am rather turned off by partners who say, “I need this” or “You must do this.” That’s because “need” and “must” are four-letter words in any relationship, and the use of “I” or “you” suggests a single party is responsible instead of a collaborative joint effort. I am much more receptive and responsive to conversations that start with “We have this challenge” or “Let us work together on an opportunity.” That way we can respond with “here’s how we solve your challenge together.”

Here’s an example: We have a partner that sells our Revenue Digital Assistant to gyms to help scale prospect engagement for driving new memberships and also to engage existing members to maximize retention and promotion of additional services (e.g. personal training, spa services, camps, etc.). When the COVID-19 pandemic forced many gyms to close, we knew we needed to be part of the solution and that Conversica’s RDA could be an integral part of accelerating recovery when gyms re-open.

Our partner knew their customers wouldn’t be able to keep up with costs during the shutdown. We quickly agreed that we should enable gyms and fitness facilities to sign up while they were closed so they could onboard their RDA to be ready for when their gym re-opened, and—in order to address both the financial constraints and the uncertainty of timing—that billing wouldn’t start until lockdown orders (depending on the location) were lifted. We also fast-tracked the introduction of a whole new RDA specifically for fundraising to help non-profit gyms (e.g. YMCA, JCC, etc.) that were especially hard hit by the shutdown.

“The impact of COVID came fast and hard to our customer base. From the early days, Conversica worked with us to identify the best ways we could work together to help our mutual customers survive by providing appropriate financial relief, prepare for re-opening by making it easier to adopt our Rapid Recovery Toolkit, and ultimately return to a thriving fitness business by leveraging AI to augment and transform their workforce. Conversica moved fast and were driven by the customer and partner experience the entire way, and as a result, we’ve been able to continue adding new customers even during this tough environment,” said Nathan Bobbin, VP Product at Daxko.

This is CHARMONY. No one is taking advantage of anyone in this situation. Both the partner and Conversica are doing what’s best for the customer. We’ve updated all of our partner agreements to reflect this with more partner-friendly terms, including shorter cycles to pay referral partners faster, and reducing or eliminating minimum commitments for resellers.

However, this is only one side of the CHARMONY coin in which Conversica is reacting to a partner’s request. It’s even better to identify challenges or opportunities proactively and present solutions rather than problems. In this way, Conversica’s partner team actively strategizes the next best action on the partner’s behalf.

Of course, our proposed solution may shift or change completely as experiments are conducted and progress is made. That’s only natural. But the point is to actively participate in an on-going relationship.

CHARMONY Challenge

Channel harmony isn’t just an external initiative. It’s also something we promote internally across every business function from Sales to Marketing to Product to Operations. The goal is to help everyone understand that what is good for one part of the Conversica ecosystem, is good for everyone in the ecosystem—and ultimately that maximizes value for everybody at Conversica.

We also promote CHARMONY internally in fun and exciting ways; like competing to see who can generate the most online engagement for a partner post on LinkedIn or hosting trivia games via Slack to promote awareness of critical partner activity.

These activities are part of our ongoing #charmonychallenge. It is a delight to see how excited Conversicans across departments are to participate. Beyond promoting support for our Partner Alliance Program, it’s also reinforced our corporate efforts during this period of remote working to support a positive company culture and foster interdepartmental collaboration.

I’ve started seeing more people and organizations adopting CHARMONY. And I couldn’t be happier about it. Because I think it’s a novel way to do what we, as business leaders, promise to do—give people what they need to succeed.

Want to learn more about Conversica’s ecosystem of partners and customers? Explore the Conversica Alliance Program to read partner success stories, checkout program benefits and review our ever-growing list of partners.