The safest market is so sad...

ERP Market 

Safe industry, whatever happens, people have to control and report their activity. Not a blue ocean but can be niched and can go differently.

Customer retention

Given the fact that only 1-2% of the sales are newly opened businesses, 98% of the business comes from competition, consequently, customer retention tends to be a major factor for success in the long run.

ERP has users and beneficiaries. Usually, the focus is on the users, mainly the accountants, rarely on the business side, and on the people that have the money and decision. Produce dashboards for C Level with real-time reports on the important stuff (revenue, costs, taxes, growth, new customers, credits).

Learn different industries and produce best practice reports databases. SMS alerts, toys that are addictive. Mobile approval solutions.

Community

As the main audience for an off-the-shelf package are the accountants, this brings a huge opportunity, to the professional community. Bring in, at the same table auditors, consulting companies, and lawyers.

Build a small online academy, a geniuses program, and training that would generate freelancers out of existing users that can support your app throughout the country. Suggest a man-day cost, and let them negotiate. Polarize industries, help customers get together and finance changes and reports and let them get royalty out of that through a points and rewards program. 

Give bundles, seminars, socialization, and lower prices for third parties through aggregation. Memberships, libraries, certifications. Bring in professional associations. Raffles/Lotteries. Vouchers. Vlog it.

Put together an accountant’s database with full data, and scores, and find the closest accountant features.

Keep it alive, show involvement, and animate. Make it addictive. Auto-generating content can be amazing. Make a damn Facebook of accountants.

Off the shelf, AirERP

Sell it like an antivirus, with yearly subscriptions. Use online demo accounts. Focus on best practices in each area. Have lots of widgets and add-ons, all on the market. The future may sound like having dashboards on smart TV. Like a Lego scale up and down, as you need, pay only for what you use, and proof it with TCO scenarios.

Go cloud, the data centers are looking for partners that can go in the cloud. Co-marketing looks possible. The cloud can be secured through physical devices that will raise the trust level. Use OTP tokens, for example, full encryption for databases.

Easy customization, from small to big. Use wizards. Respect the learning curve.

User Experience

It is a well-known and accepted factor that software products are made by engineers. Complexity, as a sum of features is welcomed, as a big pill to be swallowed is not. Ergonomics, natural language, wizards, generally speaking, UX should have a huge focus. Not necessarily going mainstream, an ERP is not Facebook, but goes from simple to complex, not the other way round. Focus on the niche, basically on the business itself. A focus group would do miracles on UX and UI.

Channel

From my experience, to have a fully functional channel of partners, it is essential to induce the necessary information, to help them start implementing, and to make sure the sales force is aligned with the methodology and mindset.

It may sound strange but I had too many times situations in which different companies were having different understandings of terms like lead and opportunity…

It is vital to be able to move your various sales objectives down the funnel at a steady and predictable rate so that your income is also steady and predictable. Also, you need to centralize, control, and mitigate the process. You get the direct requests and make a fair distribution of leads to the partners, based on transparent rules like territory, capability to deliver/load, and customer preferences.

Sales training for the new partners, correct inductions, and anti-corruption agreements are a must.

I would not try to “buy” a channel. I don’t see it as a volume acquisition. The channel partners are a long-time investment, they need to be properly chosen and grown. It is easy to get some guys from companies that are already having a channel but risks are coming along with that. You cannot control the history, the habits, the expectations, and the level of opportunity.

Lots of local companies can be approached, they have captive customers for some solutions, hardware, etc., and have no portfolio to leverage income, to grow.

The channel should have a solid governance model based on synergy, rules, predictability, methodology, added value, and margin.

Sales

Go back to predictability, methodology, trust, and anti-corruption.

Don’t sell discounts, focus on customers. For a small company, 25,000 Euro is a big investment, pay attention to the customer, and don’t include a 15,000 Euro discount in the first offer. Call, insist, support, and know the competition.

Since the market is competitive, I would promise automatic data import, not free, automatic. Data migration is usually the biggest fear.

Sell migration packages. Conserve some of the previous investments of the customers by integrating some add-ons, equipment, and third parties. Look for lifecycles, and target customers that are more than five years old at the competition.

Newsletter, not spam. Just like antiviruses, show to the market you had the first report for a new state requirement.

As said before, most of the clients are coming from the competition, big focus on retention and on sales force loyalty.

Strategy, focus on core business, sell the functional part, not the buzzword ERP. Don’t sell to IT.

Sales Toolkit that would align methodology, Objections, Documents, everything on autopilot, POC, TCO, and ROI selling. Sensational documents.

Focus on replacing mammoths like Oracle and SAP, TCO-based sales.

Finance acquisition of software, with local banks.

Target other big countries with huge production focus like Poland, Turkey, and Germany.

Bring new solutions like AutoStore for warehousing. Look for niches.

Development

Minimize effort, the number of project instances that need to be maintained should be minimum. The architecture should be unique, starting with the ERP core, and have all the industries separated in add-ons, not customizations. Go full IFRS, and treat even Romania as a localization of the IFRS core. 

The future is now. Go Industry 4.0, connect everything, and go on the floor. Scan, weigh, label, box, and pack everything. Sensors are the next business. You can do wonders with a Raspberry Pi nowadays. Everything is connected, measured, labeled, and in real-time.

Focus on really addictive areas like HR and Payroll, in which customers are most of the time trapped.

Think independent. Have the industry-specific solutions open-ended, and use them as entry points.

Try to make some of the niche solutions certified add-ons for Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, or Oracle.