10 Reasons Why Enterprise Business Partners Are So Important

Why are enterprise business partners so important?

All of us have heard the growing importance of partner-touched revenue in the overall portfolio. So much is the buzz that its hard to find someone in SAP who doesn’t remember by heart that we need to get to 40% of SAP’s total revenue to be driven by partners by 2015.

And such a significant portion of our business being driven by partners makes one want to understand, especially when many industries don’t show this phenomenon, fundamentally what are the reasons behind this reality.

So my all conversations with others & my personal thoughts can be summarized in the following 10 reasons why enterprise business partners are probably the most important part of an enterprise software company’s business:

• Enterprise IT is an Orchestra: Customer needs a lot more that just a software on a disk to really make his or her business run better

• Limited direct selling capability: Direct sales force can’t reach everyone, we need partners to help us get to people we can’t get to profitably today.

• Huge portfolio: imagine if Unilever stops selling via retailers and there is a direct sales guy who comes to your house and tries to sell the 2000+ products they have, would be a nightmare. Though it is possible to do so for a Salesman from a Car company such as Toyato with say 20-30 products in its portfolio.

• Foot in the door: Partner sales teams are a Route to market where your direct sales teams have not been able to get in, this gives an opportunity to let the customer experience the power of your products.

• Increased innovation: While a company’s own innovation strategy is working its the partners who help it seem even more innovative via building innovations with it or on top of it solutions. Biggest examples being the start-ups innovating on top of HANA platform.

• Reduced market risk: As a company starts having more partners whose revenues get significantly impacted by its business, its revenue stream will become more stable

• Human resource development: You are developing a very capable HR base (i.e. the partner employees who are exposed to your Ecosystem) for future hiring without any direct expenses.

• Free marketing via word of mouth: the more lives a company touches the more people will talk about it and hence build a stronger brand even for its core products.

• Ego is one thing being smart is another: If anyone is can do something better and cheaper than you, its always smarter to be friends with her than being foes.

• Use your brand to earn more: If someone can build it but just can’t sell it well, never hesitate to get a new revenue stream by branding it yours. Key is to be responsible about that power the customers have vested in you to help them become better businesses, so you need to help make the right choices for your customers.

Published at: http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/innovation/10-reasons-why-partners-are-so-important-026559

TV is dying: Why should B2B marketers care?!?!

Its a fact that the traditional mass marketing medium of choice or the media bohemoth..... Television is dying!

To understand the change, major marketing spenders such as P&G, Unilever, Nestle even till early 2000's were spending over 95% of their media dollars on TV. Today for some brands its fallen below the 50% mark.
The issue:
1) Less and less people are consuming TV content
2) Traditional way of delivering messages on TV has no cut through whatsoever with the Generation Z consumers

But the fact remains we are not selling detergents or cereal or colas so why should we care. The reality is the impact is not small by any strech of imagination & it will only increase in future.

The key difference between B2C and B2B marketing has been the marketing channels that are being used. B2B marketers have always believed in cherry picking their targets instead of carpet bombing the consumers like B2C marketers.
But thats exactly the change B2C is seeing, they are entering into a world of technology & newer channels where their targetting abilities are much higher. Examples being Blogs, Facebook, twitter, Video prerolls(e.g. these are the ads which run before your youtube videos), events, niche magazines.  The latest buzzword is Integrated Marketing communication Mix which essentially forces B2C marketers to look for newer more targeted channels.

This is a step that B2B took long before the B2C marketers but now they are following us and crowding those channels more and more. It does have an impact on corportate branding in a big way the choices of mediums become lesser, more expensive & worst of all crowded. No longer are Airports meant just for business or financial brands like SAP, Oracle, HSBC etc. Just a couple of weeks ago I saw at Singapore airport a huge video Billboard of Pepsi running a video content which was not their traditional TV ad, but much more engaging content! This wouldnt have happened 5-10 yrs back.
When the communications you see becomes more and more in number and variety you stop paying attention, thats just normal human behavior. And thats what happenened to TV and thats whats happening to B2B marketer's channels such as strategic Out of Home, Digital, social etc.

Need of the hour is, when we get about crafting our messaging for any collateral or piece of communication where we dont know the consumers of the information keep in mind you are not just competing with Oracle, IBM or Microsoft you are competiting with each of the Brands that you see in the supermarket or you local Mall.

So, make the content & the delivery of that content so INTERESTING that it stands out in a crowd which is much bigger than what we thought.

Consumer (NOT customer) is the Boss- Changing approach for B2B marketing

Changing paradigms for B2B Businesses such as IT: An Observation

I could see this change happening across businesses which is in line with SAP's overall strategy, but maybe we do have a need to acknowledge this more overtly to act faster and get that competitive advantage in the marketplace. Sharing my thoughts on this & will welcome reactions from the rest of the community here.

Customer & consumer, for many people they might seem like synonyms. But in reality the difference between them is extremely significant & is increasing each day at a tremendous pace especially for B2B businesses. The impact of this change can be far reaching for entire business strategy for many organizations.

Customer vs. Consumer

Let us start with the basics, Customer is any individual or organization as a whole which takes a buying decision keeping views of the multiple stakeholders in mind.

Consumer, on the other hand, is the individual who will finally end up using the product each day to do his job.

Traditionally, Consumers have been considered a subset of customer as one of the many stakeholders. This still holds true but what is changing drastically now is the balance of power among different stakeholders.

Changing Times

Gone are the days where IT budgets were growing each year and CIOs & IT managers could buy any product they wanted with minimum intervention from business. Today, increasingly Business demands dictate IT purchases. While no one can undermine relationships that Sales Executives make with the decision makers in organizations but today it is not sufficient without a fantastic product which is being marketed in the right way for those end consumers. That basic phenomenon is leading to a change in the way entire organizations need to start thinking especially product design & marketing.

At the essence of it are two fundamental ideas of Design thinking & Pull Marketing come together to maximize around the fact that “It’s the Consumer (NOT customer) who is the Boss”.

Adapting to this New World

In this new iEconomy everything including Enterprise solutions need to be beautiful, intuitive, simple & yet highly efficient.

Design Thinking needs to be at the heart of a solution’s drawing board in the form of intended User Experience, even before the first line of code is written. This calls for a superior understanding of end user, that too, personally for everyone involved in the development of the solution.

There are numerous examples in other industries, such as when Unilever went about the task of creating the next big thing in Laundry for emerging countries its R&D members lived with some Lower middle class families in India to really live their lives & in the true sense putting themselves in the Consumer’s shoes. That is the direction where solution design needs to move if we truly want the Consumer to want our products.

Pull Marketing is something that traditionally B2C marketers have focused all their attention on, while for B2B it has always been push focusing on the decision makers. But with consumer at the center of creating demand for B2B products, marketers need to redesign strategies & touchpoints where consumers or end users will most likely be able to see us & will be most susceptible to their messaging. While the concept is the same as B2C, executionally one needs to understand & tweak to suit the Business Consumers.

Pull Marketing: Over-deliver and make them say WOW

1)    Brand Centric: Creating a strong brand identity centered at a positive experience for the consumer. This happens when the Product attributes, like design or support experience, over-deliver on their expectations. More often than not, her expectation is just adding simplicity to her daily work.

It could also be marketing driven, such as doing activities that create such situations of positive experience of over delivering. E.g. Webinar focused on how a product makes a significant change before & after in simplifying her life.

Additionally, inspirational & consistent marketing language in mass media adds to the Brand centric pull creation.

2)    Product centric: This is very specific to a certain group of users of a particular solution. It’s a 3 step process:

a.    WHO: The First step is to understand the Pain points for the consumer. This is the key for everything that follows. As a marketer, there is no replacement for a crystal clear understanding of your consumer. Humanize the understanding by giving him a name along with personality attributes.

b.    WHAT: The next step is to identify how your solution is able to over-deliver vs. the current situation & improve his life.

c.    HOW: Focus on that improvement and create demos/webinars/collateral which talk to these consumers in their simple language about their problems. Also important to understand where the consumer is susceptible to getting your message e.g. an offsite presentation for just 10 employees of a department where you could WOW them enough for them to go back & talk to their peers might be much more cost effective than bombarding all 1000 of them with links for specific online trainings.

This is fundamental shift in the way all organizations need to think & act, build & market for not just who buy your products rather focus on those who will use them eventually.