Kathy Gibson reports from Sage Future for Partners in Amsterdam – Resellers that are winning in the AI age are those that use the technology to make their service proposition more compelling for customers.
Jordaan Burger, MD of Sage South Africa, believes that a growth mindset requires that we challenge established practices – and do so with confidence.
“Fast-growing partners are those the learn quickly, share their learnings and change the established methodologies,” he says.
He says these winning partners share five characteristics.
Focus on lifetime value
The first is that they build around customer lifetime value rather than focusing only on project revenue.
“This means your go-live date is no longer the end of implementation: it’s the starting place to add value; the start of the renewal conversion; and the start of the referral conversation.
“Fast-growing partners optimise the full customer lifecycle and create a customer for life.”
Damon Scarr, GM: APAC at Sage, adds that the fastest-growing partners attack renewals on the front foot.
To check their progress, he recommends that resellers measure the time from go-live to the first value review; product or module adoption; the expansion pipeline; renewal and retention; referenceable customers and referrals generated; and customer lifetime value.
Make it repeatable
The second characteristic, says Burger, is making expertise repeatable
“Capture lessons from every implementation, and reuse them. Build templates by industry, geography and migration path. Prepare reusable demos, process flows, reports and proof of concepts. And reuse proven module and code.
“For fast-growing partners, expertise is converted into systems and assets the whole team can use.”
Scarr points out that, if knowledge resides only with the best consultants, then the business is not scalable.
“Make expertise repeatable,” he says.
To do this, partners should measure the percentage of reusable assets they have; demonstration preparation time; their discovery to proposal to win purchase cycle; gross margin by project type; content engagement and inbound enquiries by vertical; and conversion rate for packaged versus bespoke projects.
Remove friction
The third characteristic of fastest-growing partners is that they invest in the capabilities that remove customer friction.
“Build proposals that connect with adjacent technologies,” says Burger. “Develop practical integration across ERP, and invest in developers and technical infrastructure expertise.
“Use these specific capabilities to reduce implementation effort and support demand.
“The fastest-growing partners extend and connect the product to solve the customers operational reality.”
Scarr adds that customer friction generally boils down to fear of the unknown. “So they experience value when a business process is faster, clearer or more reliable.”
He urges partners to measure contract to kick-off time; kick-off to first value time; implementation duration; the percentage of standard versus customised systems; customer effort required; and the time it takes to resolve issues.
Never stop learning
Winning partners are those that create a learning organisation.
“How you share knowledge between teams is critical,” says Burger.
He urges partners to review new AI tools and their implication as part of normal work, and to cross-train teams across products and customer scenarios.
“To do this, use boot camps, project shadowing and certification, to move learning into delivery. And pair response use guidance with practical experimentation.
“The fastest-growing partners are those where knowledge moves across teams and becomes a shared commercial capability.”
Scarr adds: “The advantage is not access to AI – the advantage is how quickly your organisation learns and applies AI responsibly to real customer problems.”
In light of this, he says companies should measure AI learning participation; the number of validated use cases moved into normal work; AI-supported service opportunities; customer adoption satisfaction; the customer effort required; and the time to resolve issue.
Scalable ecosystem
Scale is the final key to becoming a fast-growing partner. “Focus deeply, then use the ecosystem to scale,” says Burger.
For instance, he says customers could define the ideal customer and then build an industry specific proposition around that definition.
Or they could concentrate investment on the strongest product and delivery capability and scale that.
Partners should look to build strong alliances across the age ecosystem, and share knowledge with other partners to answer faster and close with confidence, he adds.
“The fastest-growing business partners know where to specialise and where collaboration creates greater customer value,” Burger says.
Scarr agrees, saying specialisation doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. “It means being unmistakably good at the problem you own and knowing who completes the solution.”
He says partners should measure their revenue and pipeline from priority segments; what their rates are in their chosen niche; and where ecosystem-sourced opportunities lie. They can then develop joint campaign pipelines, with referenceable customers by vertical industry.
“The big advantage for partners is that they can use trusted AI to help them respond faster, deliver greater insights, remove friction, improve customer experience, create new advisory and develop lifecycle services,” Scarr says.
“But remember: AI can accelerate value, but confidence depends on how responsibly it is governed, applied and translated into trusted customer outcomes.”