Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. My guest on this episode is Chris Reaburn, the Chief Marketing Officer of Nextiva. He's a Chiefs fan, and I'm recording this intro a day after the Super Bowl; one for the ages, and one of my Eagles did not win. So, as hard as it is to be gracious right now, I still have to say this is one of my favorite episodes.
Chris is a C-level exec and a marketer in a company that Chris considers the anti-tech company. They started out like several businesses that we've talked to on the pod as a UCaaS provider based around the BroadSoft stack, which was a software platform that eventually got purchased by Cisco that powered many of the early way providers.
Back then, the conversation with customers was about moving from prem to cloud. It wasn't really about features, until it became about features when several SaaS companies jumped in to become part of the story. You're not good if you're running other people's software. It's all about the features valuations followed.
Today, even those companies, those great companies are reckoning with the post covid dominance of Teams and Zoom. And yet Nextiva survived and thrived throughout all of those stages when everyone else was developing their own app to communicate, Nextiva was focused on how complicated it was going to get when all of those applications reached critical mass in adoption. By their numbers, the average worker uses 15 to 20 applications per day to communicate, losing up to two hours or so in contact switching. Nextiva is indeed a hosted voice provider with their own software, but that software is designed as a conversation based work hub where all of your apps can be seen in real time, including their own features. Voice chat meetings, sure, but also Teams, Slack, zoom messaging apps, CRMs one place.
Their mission to eliminate silos is what makes up their market approach today. Rather than fight the others, they decided to play nice with all of them and take advantage of our desire for ease of use, and in the meantime, they're gonna get some valuable time back. What's the best app? Well, according to Chris, the right channel for customers is the one they want to use.
Okay, I can get behind that.
Let's check out my conversation with Chris Reaburn from Nextiva.
ABOUT CHRIS REABURN
Chris Reaburn is the Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva, responsible for championing Nextiva's brand and products in the market in support of the company's vision to change the way businesses around the world work together and serve their customers.
With 20+ years leading marketing and strategy in communications, software and services businesses after a career as a naval officer, Chris leads with his unabashed love for Nextiva customers, ensuring the entire brand experience is best-in-class at every touch point.
More than 100,000 businesses depend on Nextiva to start more than 6 billion conversations each year. Chris is known within Nextiva for wearing a t-shirt with a customer logo to work every day, bringing a Nextiva customer into every meeting and each conversation.
CONTACT CHRIS REABURN
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reaburn/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/reaburn
Website: http://www.nextiva.com