Looking forward to the next 500

What a journey it has been.  As we announced our 500^th Zetadocs for NAV sale at the Directions conference in Nashville this week, my mind wandered back to our first sales a few years ago.  “How did we get here?”, I thought.  The answer, of course, was right before me in the form of nearly 70 people from the NAV partner community that were attending our session.  We certainly couldn't have reached this milestone without them.  I felt a debt of gratitude and hoped that I had done as much to help their businesses and those of their NAV clients’ as they had done to help ours.

My pondering of our relationship with the NAV partner community was put on hold temporarily as I announced that we would like to have Mark Christie, the CEO of ABC Computers, on stage to accept an award - “2013 North American Zetadocs for NAV Partner of the Year”. This was in recognition of an outstanding commitment to partnering with Equisys to sell Zetadocs, in addition to selling the 500^th Zetadocs system in September.  I had alerted Mark before the show that we would be recognizing his organization during our session for their outstanding commitment to delivering the Zetadocs solution set to the ABC Computers customer base.  I had also asked him to say a few words about how they approached partnering with an ISV like Equisys.

Mark’s advice illustrated how a mutually beneficial partnership should work.  His advice was twofold:

Have a clear focus

In order to successfully sell any software solution, an organization must devote some focus to that solution.  It’s difficult to sell any software occasionally and become proficient enough at it from a technical and consultative standpoint to make it a profitable endeavor.  Mark mentioned that ABC Computers took an approach in 2013 to focus on a single ISV solution in each quarter.  Luckily for Equisys, their Q1 focus was Zetadocs.  Mark’s team put efforts in place to become proficient in marketing, selling and supporting Zetadocs.  They wanted to become experts.  That effort paid off in numerous sales of Zetadocs systems ranging from the complex to the very basic.  Most importantly, it resulted in successful projects and happy customers.

It’s a partnership

Mark then touched on something near and dear to my heart:  What can an ISV do to help partners?  As an ISV we rely on the NAV partner channel and it is our duty to support our partner channel at every turn to help make Zetadocs a valuable offering for their organization.  What does that entail?  He touched on sales training and technical training, and general involvement from the ISV.  He mentioned that we travelled to South Bend, Indiana for their 2013 sales and marketing kick off meeting.  At that meeting we had a two-way conversation with their sales team to determine how we could work together. The technical side of this involved a dedication to installation and configuration training for the team at ABC Computers.  It also included pre-sales support ensuring successful implementations and most importantly… happy customers.

This two-way dedication between NAV partner and ISV is a beautiful thing to watch when it is properly set in motion.  The result was an outstanding year selling Zetadocs for ABC Computers.  When deciding who would be the Zetadocs Partner of the Year, this story of collaboration made ABC Computers the clear choice. Two organizations helping each other to accomplish their respective organizational goals all while making NAV users’ lives easier… what a story.

Watch Mark accept his award.  We at Equisys look forward to the opportunity to work with other NAV partners in the same way.