Avaya : The Collaboration Experts

An Eye on the Future

To better align growth assets with this opportunity, Chirico had to reorganize Avaya’s approach to commercial operations. He views people as Avaya’s biggest growth asset.

“One of the things we did to make our revenue team more successful was to bring in a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Stephen Spears, to create a single point of authority over that entire go to market organization on a global scale. Stephen is the accountable party for marketing, sales, delivery, customer success, professional services, and all the channel partners that support our organization. These are hard line reports,” says Chirico.

Another important aspect of getting sales, marketing, services, and customer success to work as one revenue team was to align incentives around a common set of strategic growth goals. “Aligning our incentives and KPIs with our overall objectives is extremely important to achieving our growth goals, especially as we move from a product company to a SaaS / cloud company,” states Chirico. ”It is important to make sure that those incentives are driving the right outcomes and behaviors and drive accountability through the process as well. For the last four years we have spent a lot of time on incentive management as a senior leadership team.”

“We want our entire revenue team aligned around common goals, regardless of whether they are quota carrying, non-quota carrying or leadership,” according to Chirico. “Our quota carrying reps are obviously incented by revenue. Here we focus them on driving new cloud revenues, selling new solutions and penetrating new markets. For the non-quota carrying employees in both sales and marketing we have a bonus structure that is built on the same metrics. And I am also paid on the same incentives as the employees. We are all in it together. One Revenue team. And I think that level of common purpose is extremely important, and it is a rallying cry for all of us.”

“I think there‘s still a huge opportunity for our partners to sell ACO [Avaya Cloud Office] on the UC side. On the contact center side, we just announced in July that we are continuing to build out our CCaaS [contact center-as-a-service] offer. Now we have digital channels. This quarter we’ll bring edge-based routing and analytics. We‘re working with partners now to get them up to speed to sell our CCaaS solution. Now you won’t need to go with ACO and someone else, it’s one package. We think that’s a huge opportunity for channel partners,” concludes Chirico.