Differentiate Your SAP Business One Practice And Thrive

As eager participants in the IT industry we sometimes have an overdeveloped sense of our pervasiveness in the market. After all everyone knows what ERP is right?

And BI , SOA, XML and a list of other acronyms we throw around in every day conversation like we were discussing the latest news or last nights episode of TV. But the fact is that many small business customers still don’t know what ERP software is or how it can help them, not to mention the fact that SAP has a solution built for the small business space – often they don’t have any brand recognition of SAP at all. So once you get in front of a potential small business customer who doesn’t really quite understand what you do you can understand that they have difficulty determining the difference between one vendor and another and one solution vs. another.

Even when you are in the unfortunate position of bidding for the same customer against another SAP partner, how does your prospective customer make that decision between the two of you? So your role is to make it easy for them to see and understand why they should choose you and that is by differentiating what you do from everyone else.

I was in a discussion with a partner yesterday and we were discussing the fact that they had built a significant number of small add-ons, let’s call them applets for the sake of the discussion. As a result of doing more than 50+ implementations they had built up a library of little code pieces for performing small tasks in SAP Business One which were kind of like a “get out of jail free” card for their consultants on projects.

What if, I suggested, you take those code snippets, build them together in to a single application, call it the Partner X Solution Pack and offer it to customers as part of the purchase of their SAP Business One solution from you?

Better still offer them via a software subscription model that includes any additional applets that they built in the future and increase their annuity revenue stream from their customer base – and think about the profitability on that revenue stream!

Now they have something that the competitors can’t offer and as the cost of building that solution has already been incurred, they can use this additional solution pack as part of their negotiating position on the deal.

As you consider running the Start and Grow campaign, think about the ways that you can package your services and the little value add things that you do, explain why you do it and how you have helped your customers deliver improvements to their business. You’ll be surprised at the impact it will have.

Here’s a suggestion.

If you run regular team meetings, each meeting ask your consultants or pre-sales people to think about the clients they have worked with in the time since the last meeting and explain what they did and how it helped the customer. Often we do things that have a major impact on our customers but we take it for granted because it’s just what we do. But imagine the power of taking that and articulating what it meant to the customer. Can you attach a financial value to that?

Suddenly you are on your way to building another example of the return on investments your customers have experienced as a result of working with you. Better still put it in a short article and use that content in a blog, a newsletter or a case study and next time someone asks ‘why should I purchase my solution from you?’, you’ll have a library of great reasons…with dollar savings achieved by other customers ready to quote.

I guarantee that you will see an impact in how your prospective customers perceive you – do it regularly and it will become a standard part of the way you do things….another key differentiator.

PS. Do you have a way of doing things that is different to your competitors? Maybe it’s your pre-sales discovery approach, your 6 step implementation program or your existing customer follow-up program. Package it, write about what it is, how it helps your customers and give it a name. For example the Partner X NewStarter Program which includes a free 3 hour introduction to SAP Business One for any new employee that joins your customers company. Even better, build it and deliver it as an eLearning module and reduce your cost of delivery.

Write to me at richard.duffy@sap.com and tell me about your unique approach! I would be more than happy to write you a promotional piece describing that approach that you can use on your web site or as part of your sales kit.

Another point of differentiation?