As I continue to opine post-ChannelCon (the annual CompTIA conference held in early August in Austin, TX), I’ve collected my thoughts about an extended conversation I had with Marc Monday, SAP Vice President, Partnerships and Ecosystems, at the event. Monday and I crossed paths back in the day during his seven-year
tenure at Microsoft as a Senior Director (he departed Microsoft in late 2012 for VMware).
First some context. SMB Nation has historically had a distant relationship with SAP. If for no other reason than it was just to great people who couldn’t be in a marriage together. In the past, there was no confusion that SAP was focused on large enterprises, etc. SMB Nation essentially the opposite. It appears that is now changing.
This is a start over story for MSPs seeking the next great thing!
“Make no mistake about it. Moving forward SAP is going big in the channel.” Monday shared. “In the past, partners such as SMB Nation, might have thought SAP was too big, too complicated and perhaps a direct threat.” SAP wants to demystify that.
Monday shared that SAP wants to meet you where you (the partner) are. You have customer fluency, customer intimacy, and the partner has the customer relationship. “Whether you started in IT-side, started in Cloud Services, or the business-side, SAP wants to be your partner in the partner lifecycle: awareness, enablement, execution, sales, scale.” Monday added. Right now we are doing a lot of awareness.
Marc Monday (left), Jennifer Hallmark, Sachin Vora and myself talking SAP and Concur!
So how would an SMB Nation partner, looking to reboot into a business realm, work with SAP? SAP co-sell model is capitalizing on the trusted business advisor status the partner has with the customer (e.g. the oft-used example of the banker, accountant, lawyer, then the IT professional/MSP being the trusted advisors).
With respect to the co-selling motion, “…the compelling story is how can we save the customer money - for example - digitizing expenses, etc. The challenge we have with the partners, MSPs and VARs is we have to get them comfortable shifting from selling compute to selling business solutions. We're not asking you to learn SAP…especially all in a day. This is a co-sell model.” Monday said.
“We're not asking you to get an MBA overnight. What we're saying is that you have some customer fluency. We want to arm you with the next few questions: inventory management, cost control, etc. What's the customer pain? Once we've identified that, the beauty is that the partner saddles up with the SAP representative to go get the business.” Monday shared. “We are looking for hungry partners willing…not afraid…not afraid to go to the CFO…”
Monday added “Partners need to be educated on what problem the customer is trying to solve - cash flow, expense management, spend…we’re trying to create a community for the partner to realize with SAP, they can tell Mr. Client that ‘I can help you with that’.”
Partner evidence? Monday offered up a success story. An SAP partner, Orchestra Software (Portland, OR), has a niche in breweries. It’s developed customer fluency leading to several industry awards including a listing on the Inc. 5000 list in 2016.
Finally, I circled back to an original concern about SAP playing in the SMB space. I asked Monday if there is such a thing as a Baby SAP? Essentially the answer is not explicitly. “We have a "business by design" framework where we can meet the customer where they are. And for the partner, we want to help you have a line-of-business conversation.”