Keeping customers for the long-term:
In the shift to the cloud, partners will play a different role across the entire lifecycle of a customer. In a pre-sales environment partners should focus on building trust immediately with very transparent plans and a focus on value realisation, ‘Here is our joint plan and the value I believe you will gain if you move forward with SAP’.
Once a sale is complete partners need to shift their thinking beyond the implementation with a plan for customer adoption and usage. I like to say ‘the renewal cycle begins the day you get the sale’ because customers who go to the cloud expect a faster return on their investment. Partners should evaluate if they are ready to support these new realities. A customer who adopts faster will use more of the service which leads to immediate value. The value created here leads to further use cases for additional services either through upsell or cross-sell. All of this leads to higher retention rates towards renewal.
Partners should remember to think about the end-users and do they need training and enablement. This is where all business becomes very local between our partners and the customer. Our partners can do a much better job at scale to translate how SAP offerings can meet the unique needs of each customer.
Increasingly as SAP begins to move development to the cloud first, you can expect an increase in the pace of SAP’s innovation. As a result, new features and capabilities will be available for customers in a different pattern than what they may be used to. Partners who stay on top of SAP’s product roadmaps have an immediate advantage to be seen as the expert by educating the customer on new ways to capture even greater return on their investment.”
Next Steps:
1) Head to the dedicated section on Partner-Led Demand Generation on the SAP Partner Portal – all the workshops, programmes, content, campaigns, and services delivered by the Partner Marketing team can be found there.
2) Subscribe to the Global Partner Newsletter and check out the marketing sections for the latest marketing news.
3) Stay in touch with Partner Business Managers to get ahead of new programmes and support from Global Partner Marketing.
