Qualtrics aims to double revenue with channel co-development strategy

Qualtrics wants to double its annual recurring revenue to US$2 billion by tapping into channel partners, with a particular focus on the Asia Pacific region.

The feedback collection and analysis vendor is adding headcount to its regional partner teams, preparing to launch a new partner programme, and working with partners to create novel solutions based on Qualtrics products.

Qualtrics chief partner officer Sean Holcombe said the company recognised the importance of both its global and regional partners.

“The relationships we've had with those channel partners has been primarily around driving better thought leadership in the experience space, whether that be customer or employee based, and then augmenting our services thinking from a both strategic and consultative point of view, as well as delivery and ongoing managed services," he told techpartner.news.

He said that the company was planning to invest into regional partners to support their growth in the Australia and New Zealand region, as well as Asia Pacific more broadly.

“We're putting additional headcount into the region, supporting our partners through more robust marketing budgets, and then … really trying to help our partners define their own brand identity within Qualtrics to scale thrift revenues as well as ours together, all focused around impact for our end clients," he said.

Holcombe said that the biggest opportunity for partners is in taking advantage of how Qualtrics products are changing. 

“If you wind the clock back 10 or so years, a lot of the experience-led programmes were predominantly survey based in nature. Progressively, they've become a much more omni-channel experience approach, where we're looking at calls and chats and social media and blogs and pretty much any qualitative content you can throw at Qualtrics.”

Holcombe added that the company was also investing in agentic systems.

He said the company had developed proprietary large language models that were trained on what he claimed was the largest human capital sentiment database in the world.

These are the basis of different agents that can use the contextual understanding capability that LLMs offer to automate the process of responding to customers with what he said was a “personalised and empathetic touch, but without having to rely on a human”.

Holcombe said key to the vendor’s channel approach would be helping them develop new solutions based on Qualtrics products.

“That could be service oriented technology or integrations based, that allows each of our partners to establish their own brand identity, to make it easy for the end client or our selling account teams to understand what a particular partner is best in class at," he said.

He described several solutions that partners had created that were being co-sold.

One was a proprietary way to help an end client see return on investment of a Qualtrics programme. Another by global consultancy Bain & Company integrates with the consultancy’s Qualtrics experience programme to let them “validate how well they're doing as an individual client against the broader set of Bain companies”.

He said Qualtrics wants to make it easy to attach those solutions to end client problems.

“We see when that happens, win rates go up, trust between the client, Qualtrics and the partner goes up, and that partner generally has a better attach rate for their ongoing managed services, which benefits their bottom line," he explained.