The Economic Opportunity of a Partnership Pt. 2 – The Service Opportunity
One of the most common discussions we have with our partners is on the topic of evaluating the economic opportunity of a partnership. What makes a partnership worth entering into, and when can you tell it’s the right time to hop in?
In Part 2 of our Economic Opportunity P2PNow series, we drill down into brand and discuss why it’s so important to work with vendors who specialize in services you’re already familiar with. Watch the session below or read on for a full transcript!
Transcription
Sam: This episode is part 2 of our series evaluating the economic opportunity of a partnership.
Christian: That’s right. In case you missed it, check out the first part where we discuss the three areas you can evaluate when accessing economic opportunity.
To recap we discussed, we covered resale revenue, service opportunity, and operational efficiency.
Sam: Yup! Today we’re going to dive deep on that second point – brand.
Christian: So Sam, by definition “economic” tends to focus just on the numbers. Why should partners be considering service opportunities in this evaluation?
Sam: Well I’m so glad you asked Christian! This is a very complimentary side of just resale or referral revenue from a vendor.
The vast majority of partners AvePoint works with are making the majority of their revenue from services.
So, you’ll want to work with vendors who align with services your teams are already experts in.
Christian: Right. Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, Google are all large massive eco-systems your teams may already have expertise in. The vendors you connect with should align with those organizations.
Sam: Correct. The next step is – how does the vendor manage opportunities that affect customer deployments where they cannot fulfill all customers services needs.
AvePoint for example has a mature service organization but they only assist with deploying complex AvePoint solution deployments. However, for the majority of our standard deployments we prefer to engage a partner if possible.
Christian: Having a vendors that can give out the service opportunities is a huge opportunity! Not only are your teams getting education on a new solution for their customers. Now there’s an additional revenue opportunity by working with that vendor as their business continues to expand.
Sam: Exactly, ask the vendors you work with what opportunities there are to take on services opportunities. They may not be able to guarantee a pipeline but if you can get in contact with the team that manages those services and join their bench. You’ll be able to quickly realize an ROI for investing in learning about their tech.
Christian: That’s as simple as it is! This puts a wrap on part two of our Evaluating the economic opportunity series. Join us for part three where we discuss operational efficiency, and if you haven’t done so already be sure to join AvePoint’s Partner Program, which you can find at www.avepoint.com/partners.
Keep up with P2PNow and all of our series by subscribing to our blog.
An Office Apps & Services MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, Christian Buckley is an internationally recognized author and speaker and runs the community-focused CollabTalk blog, podcast, and tweetjam series.
