Twilio CRO on why the company depends on its partners

The CX platform uses SIs, hyperscalers and ISVs to grow its revenue streams.

Customer experience platform Twilio uses a suite of partners from system integrators, hyperscalers and ISVs, to ensure it hits its revenue goals.

Thomas Wyatt, chief revenue officer (CRO) at Twilio told CRN Australia the importance of partners to the company and how each have a unique offering for the business.

For the system integrators (SIs) they work with, it is about building out products for their end users. He said they give the business the opportunity to “customise”.

“Twilio will do certain level of professional services, but we know what our limits are,” he said.

“We have consulting partners and SI partners to build full contact centres for somebody, where we're just a key ingredient, but we're not a full stack contact centre.”

Wyatt explained how they use their ISV partners.

“To build the next generation marketing automation process to do advertising and marketing promotions, we have a number of martech ISV partners. They have great software that's powered by Twilio, but they own the customer experience down the down the line,” he said.

“Similar to Amazon, Microsoft or Databricks, we're infrastructure providers, and we're the infrastructure provider for communications and data services.

“For people to build apps and agents, and we need the end partners to be able to build the apps and agents and we depend on them.”

Partner strategy

At the moment, Twilio is focusing on eight to 10 partners in each region – including Australia – to go deep and build a strong, repeatable business.

“We're both having a lot of success, having good margins, having repeatable customers and key vertical industries to make sure that we can scale the partner community,” he said.

In previous roles, Wyatt noted some of the risks and challenges with some of the partner programs he’s been involved in is scaling too many partners too fast.

“There's not enough what's in it for them to continue to have repeatability,” he said.

“Our strategy is let's double down on a handful of partners in each region. Let's build the repeatable solutions, the sales plays, the enablement, the programs, the incentives, the demo ability, all those things have to be locked in.”

Wyatt explained that as customers start to have success with a few partners, what they find is all the sales reps want to use the same partners and then the partners start having success.

“They keep wanting to use Twilio and then eventually you have the flywheel going,” he added.

Wyatt broke down his goals for the rest of the year in terms of partners.

“Our job is to do [partner building] across every region, 2025 is about continuing to execute that, because we set the framework in place last year,” he said.

“We are supplying partners as a key strategy, we hired a new leadership team for that. Now we're rolling out the plans, new programs, new enablement, new certifications, and so we're executing it.”

Wyatt said what he loves about the go-to-market is the customer interactions. Speaking to customers during his time in Australia, he said he gets inspired by their stories.

“It's just fun. Yesterday, we spent time with three or four incredible companies, and, hearing them tell their story about how they get value from the technologies and how dependent they are with some of the things that we deliver for them is pretty powerful,” he said.