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Re: OpenERP Marketing

 

+1 to Carlos and Ana.
I had the same trouble to selling the OPW and to renew the partnership. So
far I am without partnership and the only change has been that I have USD $
3,000 more in my pocket. But need renew soon because i need sell some OPW
for some customers who want migration service to V8.

So I think that the OPW has high value for migration, but has little impact
on other services offered . Maybe OpenERP SA may rethink this product to
get more revenue.

About PULL strategy , I think it's good for OpenERP SA , considering that
currently sells services directly to end customers . Last December a client
who was trading with me, received an email with a quote from OpenERP SA
with a lower price, of course the client is upset with me because he
thought I was cheating.

So I think PULL strategy is good for OpenERP SA.

Finally, I think this is a good first step to listening to customers from
OpenERP SA (partners , end customers and community).

Regards

P. D. All issues raised here were discussed with OpenERP SA before the end
of my partnership and unfortunately they did not listen.


2014-02-16 19:26 GMT-05:00 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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>>
>> http://www.clearcorp.co.cr
>>
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>>
>
>
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