openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Ana Juaristi <ajuaristio@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carlos.... +1 to everything you are explaining in a so clear way.
About:

*The services you offer to partners are somewhat rigid in some cases. I
would love to sell an Enterprise contract with every OpenERP
implementation. But this is not possible. The OPW is not made for
end-users, us partners we have to take part in the process.*
Just an example:
As partner wanting to pivote or at less make compatible my actual bussiness
model with this new app aproach, asked to OpenERP sales people about
possibility of taking 10 users on Saas in advance for reselling but, using
them on several customers (lets say 5 different customers single user and 1
single customer with 5 users for example)  that would be 6 different DBs...
They say in that case, I would not benefit any discount of final price but
if I sell 10 users to a single customer I benefit 50% of final price. It
has nosense I think. One 10 users customer is not going to take a SAAS
aproach or at less it would be very difficult to sell.
On the other side, I say... ok so I give you the single user customer and
you invoice yourself to him... Answer: could be, but in that case that
customer is not count as part of your partnership level, better if you
invoice to him. So, you are asking to me to take care of a customer that
I'm not taking any benefit or trying to sell more users that they need
(complex both cases... ) so yourself are cutting our wings to fly and yours
to grow up.

That's only an example (I could give you 3-4 more) where you are NOT
considering your partners channel as your customers. If people wants to
make bussiness with you, you can not close the door. Whatever they are
offering you should at less consider it for opening new win-win ways. Even
if at the end you decide not to go that direction because is not strategic,
valuable for you, at less you should consider all proposals. You always say
that we must benefit of bussiness you are offering to partners but it's not
like that. Partners should give you benefit without having to force them to
sale or something, simply because you are offering so good services that
they are wanting to buy them to you. By now, services offered to partners
is only discounts on services offered to final customers. That aproach is
wrong, because final customers are much more close to partner than to you
(unless he is your own final customer). It's much more easy for partners
selling their own services to final customers thant trying to sell yours
only for discounts and small amounts of not visible valuable services (even
if they are valuable, don't misunderstand please).

I have discused this point with Nhomar several times. He can not understand
that we and most of partners I know can not sell OPW to customers. I'm
trying from begining. I never succed. Why? Maybe because I don't know
selling it (could be so training needed) or because customer consider your
company far-far away... He only wants system working and for him we are
first point of solution. They understand nothing about launchpad or
reporting bugs or creating patches and for sure they don't mind if bug is
from core or localization or custom module. He needs global support and it
can not be offered (by the moment) directly from you. For them, it doesn't
matter where is or who is OpenERP, S.A they only want a phone number (my
number) to call and solve the problem (inmediatly)
So... IMHO it's needed reviewing the way OpenERP is offering his services
to partner thinking on partner. Not in final customers and discounts for
their services.

Things that I'm ready to pay for without thinking very much on it:

   - Technical training renewal from version to version
   - Good technical doc for each new version.
   - Good reference site
   - Videos and good training material.
   - Specific industries cases of use / success
   - Modelizing different industries sectors using OpenERP standar modules
   without using custom modules.
   - Shared nice real solutions.
   - Good qualified leads. I said qualified... :)

I say again. It's not wanting to fight. It's just telling you several
things that we are missing from begining.

Thank you very much:
Ana


2014-02-17 Carlos Vásquez <carlos.vasquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Hi Fabien,
>
> I do like your thoughts about the marketing strategy in general. I agree
> with the communication techniques you propose.
>
>
> *ERP vs. Apps*
>
> As our fellow partners stated, the main discussion point is which image we
> do want to market to our customers. Speaking about the ERP vs. Apps
> approach, I kind of agree with both you and the other partners. We do not
> spend one cent in marketing, we only follow-up sales of people that contact
> us. For now it has been enough to keep us busy and running. Those people
> who contact us are almost always looking for an ERP. We usually have to
> sell an implementation project where other ERP solutions are also
> participating, sometimes there are big ERP solutions (SAP, Dynamics,
> Oracle, etc), and usually there are local ERP solutions. I think dropping
> the ERP solution as a marketing point, would affect us in this market.
>
> But, we have more and more calls from people looking for a cheaper and
> faster solution for their problems. An ERP implementation is not affordable
> nor suitable for their business. We are getting ready to offer OpenERP in a
> way very similar to your SaaS offer. This offer will be ready very soon and
> we already have several customers waiting to test it. Also, we started
> doing fast, out-of-the-box implementations about 3 months ago to gain
> experience for our new "SaaS" offer. It has proven to be very successful.
> These customers are more prone to identify themselves with a solution
> marketed as business apps running together. Here I do understand your point
> and it will help to bring more customers for this line of service.
>
>
> *Open Source*
>
> Also, the first kind of customers are usually more interested in an Open
> Source solution and they often understand its benefits and it can be an
> important sale point for them. The later kind of customers, usually do not
> know about Open Source, and they do not care. They need a good, affordable
> and reliable solution for their needs. Open or closed is the same for them.
> So again, we do have here 2 ways of marketing this because there is in fact
> (as Ana said) 2 targets.
>
> The one thing that help us in the sale process is that our customers can
> easily find us in the partners directory. The new partners page with
> automatic country filter is doing a great job with this. Also the way you
> redirect all kind of leads to us.
>
>
> Maybe it is a good idea to separate the ERP/OpenSource and the
> Apps/Product approach. Is it really necessary to choose only one way? I
> always like simplicity, but in this case, focusing only one target may be
> wrong, it is worth the discussion.
>
>
> *Pull strategy*
>
> There is one more thing I think I can give some valuable feedback. The
> services you offer to partners are somewhat rigid in some cases. I would
> love to sell an Enterprise contract with every OpenERP implementation. But
> this is not possible. The OPW is not made for end-users, us partners we
> have to take part in the process. We have worked out several bugs with the
> support team. Our experience has been varied. Sometimes the person assigned
> to the bug can solve the problem in a reasonable time frame, other times we
> have ended up fixing it ourselves. In all cases we have to spend at least a
> couple of hours in total of our time. If our customer reports a bug, we
> have to test to know where is the problem. If there is something wrong with
> some official code and there is an OPW contract we can send it to your
> team. In most cases, your team needs several replies from us. They usually
> do not do a very good job finding the problem, we have to do some heavy
> testing for them as they keep rejecting the issue of proposing some
> simplistic workaround. For important bugs, we end up spending more than 2
> hours answering mails and doing remote desktop demo sessions. At the end we
> have to integrate and deploy the solution. I explain all of this because we
> have to charge several hours to our customers on top of an Enterprise
> contract. And we also need to support the localization and customizations.
> The total cost of support gets expensive. Of course your contract also
> includes migration. But if we want to use this service, we also need to
> charge some extra fee to migrate the localization and customizations. This
> is the main reason we do not sell Enterprise contracts very often, and the
> ones we have sold, are not renewing.
>
> For partners which do develop and do heavy customization, I find the
> Enterprise service and its pricing method very rigid. I am worried because
> we could work much better with your team and get you to earn more money,
> which is good for all of us. And for our new "SaaS" offer, I contacted you
> guys to work out something to include support from your team in our cost
> structure, but the only thing you have to offer is the regular Enterprise
> support with the usual "per user" pricing method. This will at least
> duplicate our cost for each user. This is not acceptable, nor is reflecting
> the reality. You know that in this kind of service, the amount of support
> is deluded because everyone is using the same exact code base. So we
> decided to go on our own, without your support. We ran some numbers, and we
> think it will be cheaper to support the platform ourselves, even with the
> migration process.
>
> So as of now, I do not think you have good service offer for us. The
> pricing structure do not work outside Europe of North America. I know and
> appreciate you are making efforts to adapt your prices. It has been a very
> good first step. But it is not enough. You have to differentiate
> configuration only partners, from development ones. We are more than open
> and willing to work with you. So, even if you make a great marketing
> strategy, the pull strategy you propose will not work very well in our
> particular case. I think it is the best way to go, we need to improve who
> does generating partners revenue will create revenue for OpenERP S.A.
>
>
> *Recap*
>
> All of this said. I do appreciate your efforts to involve the community,
> and do think that there are great things we (the partners) can do with you
> (OpenERP S.A.). A marketing investment in marketing will benefit us. And I
> do trust your judgment to integrate internal ideas with community
> suggestions into an excellent marketing strategy.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Carlos Vásquez
> CTO · Director de Ingeniería
> CLEARCORP S.A.
>
> carlos.vasquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cel: +(506) 8351 4484
> CR: +(506) 4000 CORP (4000 2677)
> US: +1 (786) 472-4267
> skype: crvasquez
> twitter: cvclearcorp
>
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>
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>
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