How to sell and repeat
Today, there are two factors playing out in the arena of sales: repeatability and personalization. Strike the right balance, and you’re likely to cash in. As a company that has worked with channel partners for over 20 years, and has sold solutions in more than 100 countries worldwide through an extensive partner network, Equisys can claim knowledge in the art of repeatability.
After working with independent software vendors (ISV), distributors and value-added resellers (VAR), we know how to develop successful and mutually profitable partnerships to serve our customers. Fundamentally, it boils down to three sweet points for partners:
- As an ISV, there must be strong demand for your goods and services
- Your goods and services will drive new margin opportunities for the partner’s core business
- It won’t cost partners to engage and the cost of sale is low.
The age-old 80:20 rule
There is a strong argument for partners choosing ISV products that can be sold regularly and often. But first, your product needs to be solving an enduring customer pain.
For partners evaluating customer demand, the 80:20 rule applies. Partners often estimate that 80 per cent of our customers would buy an Equisys product. This is important because successful partners know that if a solution is applicable for only 20 per cent of its customers, the cost of engagement can outweigh any benefits in margin improvement or risk customer satisfaction.
Entering a partnership with a supplier can be a major investment of time and resources, but it also means no compromise on high service levels and quality support for partners’ customers. To deliver high-service levels in any product, knowledge needs be consistently high. This is best achieved by selling habitually. A steady flow of business helps reinforce the skills and expertise acquired along the way.
Mutual investment
The most successful partnerships are those where both parties make a mutual investment in serving customers.
Equisys has been extending NAV with DMS since 2007 and since NAV 2009 we have offered Zetadocs Express, our no-cost document management add-on. It’s chosen by Microsoft for using SharePoint for DMS, an area we have long-standing knowledge of, as well as what our customers demand from it.
Partners give critical market feedback from customers challenging us to deliver new features, new innovations or even entirely new classes of business. We have well established partners, such as K3 in the UK and Prodware in the Netherlands, who helped us develop our Zetadocs Delivery Essentials product in 2007.
In 2010, we extended the product family to include our Capture editions, then, in 2013, we innovated on the Microsoft Azure platform by releasing our Payables Approval edition. Zetadocs for NAV is a continuation of that innovation, with the new Zetadocs Expenses for NAV.
Today, with our partners, we continue to offer the most comprehensive suite of document management solutions available for NAV customers – from the highly repeatable to the highly customizable. The key to strong partnerships is based on two factors: excellent customer service, and a desire to deliver attractive add-ons that can solve common business problems and can be sold over and over.