As business is developing more and more, in terms of technical complexity, horizontality, and the number of partners involved in a big project, I believe a change process would help your enterprise division reposition as a rain maker for your partners and boost the enterprise figures.
This can be achieved by being more proactive in the project development phase, more involved on the customer side, more present, and more creative. Become a point of origin for big projects. Be able to hand over to the partners well-rounded, customer-site-validated business cases.
Usual problems in the enterprise business area:
- A very important percentage of the large IT companies are promoting their products or services, as an individual, not as part of a concept that understands the needs of a client.
- Most of the substance regarding products and services are being transferred to the partners, giving them the option to integrate into a potential business case or not.
- A big technology company has thousands of partners globally. Rarely a knowledge base is built around the final solution that the customer bought. Most of the time we talk about an inventory of the products sold with the sole maintenance revenue projection scope.
- Companies with a huge portfolio of products tend to be reactive at the partners and send them to dig in the knowledge base or datasheets.
- There are account managers that never stepped to a customer site and we talk big ones here. Ask and be surprised.
- Some of the partners are exceptional in terms of technical capacity. They may have big issues on commercial side, starting from predictability and ending up with integrity.
Build an engagement division!
A small business development unit can deliver a new approach to developing projects in the very complex condition of the IT market in Europe nowadays.
This kind of local unit can consist in three to five people that will cover their costs from the first year and can provide the following approach to developing project ideas:
- Business development work, resulting in finding clients and opportunities.
- Develop concepts and project ideas, that are covering real customer needs, ROI if relevant, built on site, together with the customer and are emphasizing company’s interest in delivering its products and services.
- Providing consultancy on how projects could be financed.
- Advising partners through the RFP process, making sure the partner understands the solution, and the scaling and that the technical and commercial offer is completely eligible.
- Constantly work with international partners to identify exotic projects that can be rolled out in different countries, producing accelerated high-margin deals.
- Build together with the customer, to make sure that the end user develops a technology addiction that will consolidate the success of the deal.
- Providing consultancy in selecting partners based on their specialization, eligibility, strength, and competence.
As an engagement division, this team will not only help the partners find potential customers, establish meetings, and start producing ideas. We are talking about actually taking the partners through the leads execution process, up to Prospects. This team is not only helping to build tangible mutual projects with the Prospects but can help them find ways to finance the ventures.
These are being said after learning everything the hard way, understanding the length of a sales cycle, the constant need for financing in big projects and the transparency that is needed for such endeavor.
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