Aussie partners dominate Aircall’s 2022 APAC partner awards

Adrian Bortignon (Kongo)

Australian partners have dominated at cloud-based call centre software vendor Aircall’s 2022 partner awards for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

During a ceremony held at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, five awards were handed out to partners based on a range of metrics, including new customer acquisitions and revenue.

Taking out Channel Partner of the Year was Kongo, which had brought in the most new revenue of its channel partners during 2022.

"They're [Aircall] really strong, their ICP [ideal customer profile] is in that mid-market space; we're equally as strong," said Adrian Bortignon, managing director at Kongo.

"So, our sales processes are very aligned with the way they like to sell and the way we like to sell. We're very solutions focused. So whilst we're selling software, it's really the solution around the software that makes the sale easy and stick more."

Meanwhile, recruitment software vendor and SEEK subsidiary Jobadder won Technology Partner of the Year, with it bringing in the most new customers during last year, in addition to expanding its existing customer base in 2022 by building an integration based on Aircall’s public open API.

Technology partner HubSpot's Australian team scored Integration Partner of the Year once again after winning the award last year, this time contributing the most in terms of new revenue and driving expansion in its customer base in 2022.

Salesforce's local base took the gong for Growth Partner of the Year, which was handed to the technology partner that delivered the highest year-on-year growth in terms of new revenue.

Rounding out the awards was MessageMedia, which won Innovation Partner of the Year, an accolade handed to a partner that took “the most innovative and creative approach to collaborating with Aircall to secure new business opportunities”.

In addition to HubSpot wining an award from last year, Kongo and Jobadder are also repeat winners, previously winning the 2021 awards for Growth Partner of the Year and Tech Partner of the Year, respectively.

“We want to congratulate our winners, and by extension all the technology and channel partners that are part of the Aircall ecosystem and who help us empower sales and customer services in the region,” said Fred Viet, VP of APAC at Aircall.

During the event, Frank Eagleton, director of partnerships and channel for APAC at Aircall, also revealed the vendor's three-pronged approach for its channel network during 2023, with the first being a new global partner program.

"We're aligning on a global partner program, which will essentially see us restructure the way we tier partners. It will include competency-based progression in the in the tiering and it will have a tailored reward system as well," he said to ARN.

"The program will also include additional benefits that previously weren't available like campaign-in-a-box and access to co-marketing assets as well."

The second area, Eagleton continued, is developing its library of enablement and certification.

"Hand-in-hand with the partner program, there's going to be some requirements to have certifications and enablement under the belt to move to the next tiers," he said. 

"So, producing some enablement that goes really broad, but at the same time, it goes really deep. So it's going to cover persona-based enablement."

A partner portal is also being scoped out at the moment, which Eagleton claimed will provide "better ease of business, access to content and engagement at scale". 

"All the information that you see in terms of the partner program and the enablement library will be available on the partner portal, the ability to track performance track commissions and just essentially become your one stop shop to really improve that ease of business," he added.

Sasha Karen attended Aircall's 2022 partner awards as a guest of Aircall.