Partners provide meaningful value when the dynamics between vendors, partners, customers, and products are aligned and leveraged. This value contributes to the success of vendors, partners, and customers. The value to vendors comes in the form of amplified revenue, increased profitability, expanded solution capabilities, and enhanced customer satisfaction. Partners help to deliver customer outcomes by filling in functional gaps, integrating with other solutions, adding features, and providing market-specific capabilities.
Technology Expertise
Partners provide technology expertise, making a vendor’s offering more compelling to a specific customer need, or they can bundle products and services around a technology to produce customer outcomes. They leverage knowledge of the technology to optimize configurations, provide specific use case implementations, augment features, and bundle components to produce solutions. This can be accomplished independently or collaboratively with the customer by the vendor and/or the partner. In the ecosystem co-delivery model vendors can equip partners with technical training, industry best practices, and market insights that accelerate time to value for customers and improve customer success.
Outcomes -Based Approach
Partner ecosystems can provide an outcomes-based approach to solving customer problems, rather than focusing exclusively on individual products or services. This includes:
- Assessing the need, identifying options, and recommending solutions that will work seamlessly within the client’s existing infrastructure
- Designing the solution and combining various technologies, products, and services to address specific requirements
- Customizing software or systems to meet unique client needs
- Deploying the solution by integrating and configuring hardware, software, and services
- Providing training and education to administrators, client teams, and end-users to maximize the value of the solution and accelerate time-to-value.
- Offering ongoing support and maintenance services to keep solutions running smoothly and to scale or evolve as the client’s business grows or changes.
In addition to technology expertise, partner ecosystems leverage market knowledge to open new markets by fine-tuning a vendor’s offering. They understand the crucial trends of the market and the unique needs of the customer base. They utilize this knowledge to design, sell, implement, and support offerings based on vendor products or platforms. This expertise is a key differentiator for their customers.
Efficiency and Effectiveness Benefits
Leveraging partners also provides efficiency and effectiveness benefits:
- Cost savings through process automation, resource optimization, and data management
- Efficiency and productivity improvements through streamlined workflows and improved employee performance
- Enhanced customer success leading to improved renewal rates
- Faster time-to-value for customers improving adoption
- Thought leadership for increasing the value of the solution leading to expanded utilization
- Scalability to accommodate growth and expansion
Customers are demanding specific business outcomes and partner ecosystems are critical to providing the holistic solutions required to deliver these outcomes. Vendors and partners with an ecosystem strategy that embraces collaboration, cooperation, and “coopetition” – friendly competition – will excel in the outcomes-driven market.
In the final blog of this series, we will highlight how partner ecosystems reduce sales and delivery expenses.
Did you miss Part 3 of the series? Click here to read the article
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