Unit4 Driving Shift from Service Delivery to Sales-Driven Partners

Unit4 is on the hunt for sales-driven partners in a deliberate shift away from its current model.

Most of the midmarket ERP vendor’s partners focus solely on service delivery; however, this is something the ERP software vendor is looking to change as it expands its cloud business.

“We are trying to drive that purely incremental revenue,” said Chris Richards, regional president UK&I, Unit4. “So partners will find the opportunity, they will sell it, they will deliver it — and we wouldn’t touch it.”

Part of Unit4’s plan involves signing up new partners, said Richards. As a predominantly direct sales organisation, Unit4’s goal is to see 20-25% of its overall revenue generated through partners.

Unit4’s Chris Richards

“We are looking at new partner acquisition to see whether we can bring some more sales-driven partners, rather than purely service delivery [partners].”

However, Richards said most current Unit4 partners are still service providers or implementation partners. As such, the co-sell model is still the biggest percentage of partner revenue, at around 25%.

“A partner may bring an opportunity to us but feel they haven’t got the sales resources or the capability to help sell it. So we will support them and there will be a co-sell,” explained Richards. “Or we have an opportunity and we think a partner has a specific experience, and we will introduce a partner. They wouldn’t necessarily be contracting and driving the SaaS revenue.”

Now she said the firm was “asking our partners to go out and be resellers.”

Backing the Right Horse

While the shift to sales-driven partners has been happening over the past year and a half, it demands investment from the channel.

“The quality of our service delivery has been always at the forefront as an organisation. It’s only really been the last two to three years I’ve been trying to make that shift to a more sales-led organization, which is a very different thing to try and crack. We’re getting there now,” said Emma O’Brien, CEO of Unit4 Elite partner Embridge Consulting.

Embridge Consulting’s Emma O’Brien

“We’re going out there and doing things independently, but we’ve had to invest,” O’Brien added. “We’ve backed the horse that we want to win the race, and we’re wholeheartedly confident in the future and the opportunity that it presents.

“We’ve got our own direct sales team now, we’ve got our own pre-sales resources. We’re still trying to crack the marketing engine, but that’s work in progress. But it’s been paying dividends because it’s working. We’ve got a really great, repeatable model that’s been built from high quality service delivery and high referenceability. Not doing it the other way around, trying to sell something and then try and deliver it.”

Richards said partners like Embridge bring innovation to the table at a faster pace than Unit4.

“Unit4 isn’t an SAP or an Oracle, but we can’t move as quick as our partners do. The great thing about partners … is that partners can spot product gaps very quickly plug them for our customers. And that’s a real advantage because, we just can’t move as quickly. So then customers not just get choice, they get quite fast innovation across the ecosystem as well.”