Generate more leads via prospect education

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Traditionally, the IT industry tries to seduce potential customers via functions and features.

At the end of the day however, the solution of choice consists of only 30 to 40 percent of the ultimate project success. On top of that, most of today’s ERP and CRM solutions can deliver almost all the functionality companies are looking for. So rather than focusing on the solution, it is much more effective to focus on the other success factors. Like the preparedness of the customer organization to change, the internal communication and the exemplary behavior of the management.

Have you ever thought about educating your prospects? Helping them to understand the way to project success? And are you willing to deliver that education yourself?

In this edition of QBS Talks you’ll learn how to start the process of prospect education. We will show you concrete examples of education content and formats.

“By 2020 we will have expanded our partner channel capable of selling and delivering rich Microsoft Intelligent Business Applications.”

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Exclusive interview with Tony de Freitas *

Tony – in your opinion, what is the status of the transformation process in the Dynamics partner channel today?

“Well, the answer really dependents on the view of the channel type that you look through. Today, the CRM view differs from the ERP view or even the ISV views based on the level of maturity of the partners and the respective solutions. I do see a difference in partner maturity in developing and delivering Dynamics 365 solutions in the market. One thing is for sure; there is an acceleration in our ecosystem to cloud solutions. Generally spoken, most partners are on their way to shift their traditional business models to the SaaS world. And that includes the switch from one-time services to providing ongoing recurring value through managed services, the improvement of their marketing, digital presence, developing vertical capabilities and adjusting their sales compensation plans. Speaking for the Dynamics for Customer Engagement (aka Dynamics CRM): 80 percent of all of our Value Added Resellers and Services Partners already transact and deliver services in the cloud today. The opportunity for our partners is to build on that transformation to further expand, differentiate and grow their revenue yield through Dynamics 365. That means more cloud deals. Richer deals with more IP. And more of the overall Microsoft Cloud platforms.”

Do you see any differences in the transformation between VAR’s and ISV’s?

“The Value Added Resellers for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement have made a tremendous leap-frog recently. Three years ago, a small number of them transacted in the cloud. Today that’s already 80 percent! And a great majority of them are vertically focused. We believe that the ISV partners become even more important to us in scaling our success in growing, evolving and transforming with an extensible Business Applications platform. And we see AppSource as the flywheel for the ISV and IP partners. Fundamentally it is the destination for business users to find business SaaS applications.”

What are your expectations on how CRM partners will handle the competencies challenges that come with Dynamics 365?

“The solutions that CRM partners come up with for this challenge will heavily depend on the richness of our Customer Engagement product roadmap. Overall, we all expect that over time partners embrace the broader set of Business Applications and services such as Analytics in delivering richer solutions to customers. Having said that, in the near term, I personally don’t expect that many of our traditional CRM partners will start to build out ERP practices. But evolution is starting to occur where they tend to partner to deliver on all of the Dynamic 365 applications. Our product roadmap will further accelerate the expansion of partners beyond just Customer Engagement business applications. The other way around is probably more logical and we see that taking place in the market. Most of the today’s Merger & Acquisition activities in the Dynamics channel worldwide is Dynamics AX partners buying Dynamics CRM partner companies. Anyway – I expect more partners to favor partner-to-partner cooperation over acquisitions.

Finally, I expect an overlap of our formal CRM partners that will deliver both the Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition and the Dynamics 365 Business Edition.”

Where do you predict Dynamics 365 will be in the year 2020?

“The pace of our innovation, the richness of Dynamics 365 business applications, the strength of the Microsoft cloud platforms and our accelerated growth puts us in a strong position as leaders in the marketplace. I believe that by 2020, we will have significantly expanded our partner channel capable of selling and delivering transformative customer experiences through rich Microsoft intelligent business applications. On top of that, I expect Microsoft by 2020 to be both the thought leader and the worldwide market leader in intelligent cloud solutions. For your orientation – the Microsoft cloud today grows three times faster than the cloud market.”

In your observation of the current CRM ecosystem, what are the characteristics of a successful partner in today’s market?

“Look…. this is driven by customer expectations. And it is easy to spot the partners that can deliver on those expectations. Some of the characteristics are reflected as they have vertical and deep functional expertises, transform customer experiences through digital transformation services, application development capabilities, systems/data integration and bringing insights to their business through data and analytics. This is why Dynamics 365 becomes such an important platform for our partner success. I also do not want to loose the fact that at times customers expect our partners to be an orchestrator in the ecosystem, for example they have the ability to bring other strategic partners into the solutions to meet customers needs.”

Finally. In your opinion – what are the most important Go Do’s for CRM partners?

“There are of course lots of things to do for partners. But at the end of the day this would be my top-4 recommendations:

1)      Built a business model for the SaaS world;

2)      Go deep in both functional level and vertical market(s);

3)      Lead your customer’s digital transformation process

4)      (as a bonus) Built your company on business centricity (think organization structure, culture and growth mindset), a key imperative to succeed in the first 3 aspects.”

* This is interview was part of the eXtreme365 Business Report 

7 Strong arguments to sell Dynamics NAV today

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Dynamics NAV finds itself in an interesting position today! On the one hand, it is the most successful ERP system in the worldwide mid-market by far. On the other hand, the recent announcements around Dynamics 365 created questions and even some confusion around its future. Sounds familiar to you?

In this edition of QBS Talks we give you ‘7 strong arguments to continue selling Dynamics NAV’ as the safest choice in the market today, combined with the brightest future available. We’ll teach you three smart scenarios to take your prospective customer by the hand. Step 1: let them make a safe start with Dynamics NAV or CRM. And step 2: guide them into a great Dynamics 365 future whenever the product is completely localized and the transition moment is there for them.

After watching this valuable 52 minutes’ video, you’ll walk away with a good understanding of how to position your Dynamics NAV solution even better and more effectively in the ever-changing Microsoft world. Honestly, for you as a Dynamics NAV partner, missing this session is not really an option!

Dynamics NAV Development: Extensions or Extinction?

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No one wants to be a dinosaur, it does not get you very far! If we want to run an analogy to the Yucatan asteroid some 65 million years ago, the advent of NAV 2016/NAV 2017 marks a shift to the new way of developing solutions and a threat to your capabilities if you don’t change the way you do things.

Those of you who, like me, have been involved with Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) for over 10 years, would be all too familiar with developing using C/SIDE. All your development work to date has been carefully planned around capitalising on endless days of development work on seemingly lengthy projects.

 
Dynamics 365 Acceleration Program
Are you a Microsoft Reseller who is looking for new growth possibilities and a way to honor the needs of your customers for an end-to-end solution.  Read more about this program

Services revenue may be your current strength and focus, but please consider these few points and why Extensions are making a difference:

  •  Traditional NAV development is becoming less prominent – your competitors are now quoting prospects both for traditional development and for Extensions.
  • Extensions, together with Eventing, bring complete future-proofing to your customer’s ROI in Dynamics NAV – it allows them to replace the current NAV version each year with the new version, taking advantage of any new functionality without having to undergo a traditional and costly NAV upgrade project.
  • Extensions can be re-utilised for other projects – no need to waste development time in reinventing the wheel!
  • Developing Extensions keeps your NAV Developers up-to-date with skills. They are sick and tired of doing work in NAV 2013, NAV 2009 or below. They want new challenges. If you don’t offer them the chance to stay “current” they will go and work for someone who lets them.
  • Learning about Extensions also allows your current NAV developers to get their heads around developing Apps for Dynamics 365 for Financials. The technology is the same, the purpose is different.
  • There are many .NET/C# developers on the market, looking for work at rates considerably below the NAV developer ones. If they know .NET as a programming standard and its .NET Framework, they can grasp Extensions and Eventing at a fast pace. If you already have developers with .NET skills in your organisation, you can offer them a move to your Dynamics practise.

Do you want to be in business 5 years from now, or do you want to join the dinosaurs?

As you can see from the above bullet points, there is a lot for you to think about. Do you want to be in business 5 years from now, or do you want to join the dinosaurs? They, at least, have left proof of their existence for many, many millions of years. Your business will soon be forgotten in this fast-paced digital age.

Would you like to know more? I am happy for you to drop me a line at aderosa@qbsgroup.com.

The Dynamic Channel is dead – Long live the Dynamics Channel

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I recently read the Directions 2016 business report from Guus again.

In an interview, Paul White, GM of Dynamics Product Marketing stated that only 20% of current partners will make it through the cloud transformation. This is a provocative statement and for that, it is a good wake up call to really think about your own cloud strategy  and get started in the transformation. However, I would argue that the 20% is only correct if you narrow cloud business to scalable, repeatable Dynamics 365 Business Edition business. In that 10-99 employee space, Paul makes a fair point that this segment is underserved with business applications but most customers do not accept to pay premium for typical project led implementation of an ERP and CRM application. They accept standardization in return of simple and affordable platform. And if you want to go in that standardized, simplified business you can only make it profitable if you do it at scale and reduce your cost of sales and time to market. I also agree that it is unlikely you can do both approaches, the project led and scalable small business in one organization. You need different skill sets and processes in sales and marketing. So far, so good and to that extend, only few partners will take that leap and create a new and differentiated organization and go-to-market.

But here is my big BUT…. Not all customers will go for standardized and simplified solution. We will continue to have customers that have very specific business processes , that have a rather sophisticated organizational setup or complex processes to maximize impact for their customers. And if they want to optimized these processes with a business application, they need expertise and deep knowledge to map business process with a business application. No doubt, this business application will likely be a multi tenant cloud solution in future. But that doesn’t take away the need to spend quality time with customer to understand their specific needs, developing process flows and customize the business application to fulfill the needs of a customer. And here we are again at the project led business with consultants and a tailored solution.

So my point is that embracing the cloud architecture and Dynamics 365 for that matter, does not equal having a scalable, standardized go-to-market approach. And if you happen to transform your Dynamics Solution into the cloud and App architecture, but you maintain your consulting approach to customers that outgrow the standardized solutions, then you have a bright future ahead of you. You will not count to the 20% of partners that scale in terms of customer adds, correct, but that was not your business strategy to start with. Again, embracing Dynamics 365 and transforming IP to sit as extension and app on top of Dynamics 365 is a mandate in my view. You want to provide a modern, flexible and scalable platform to customers and stay ahead of competitors.

In that process, we take pride in being your sparring partner, providing trainings, consultancy and best practices to undergo this transformation. We also like to provide you with a platform to optimize your resources, outsourcing some of the lower level migration work and bringing in fresh capabilities and capacity through Dynasource. And we want to bring new prospects for your solution and your services through our Take-the-Lead program, even if you are not counting yourself into the 20% scale cloud partners. We are confident, you have a prosperous business ahead of you.

Do you know your new competitors with Dynamics 365 for Financials?

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The new kids-on-the-block with outsell you on Dynamics 365 for Financials!

Just as you thought you had your grip on your direct competitors in the Dynamics NAV channel, here comes the new breed of “born in the cloud” Dynamics 365 for Financials new-kids-on-the-block.

Up to now, you have been able to showcase your competencies, capabilities and company strengths whether you have been “head-to-head” with other ERP vendors, or existing NAV VARs. It hasn’t mattered if you won or lost against these competitors: they are seen as your constant antagonists and you have assumed that “I may have lost this time, but next time I will win“.

This is exactly how most Dynamics NAV partners think. Let me tell you that you need to start thinking differently! Your new competitors are a different kind of antithesis. You could define these as:

  • Start-Up & entrepreneurial
  • Aim for high customer adds with minimum accountability
  • Building their practice on a OPEX model: CSP recurrent revenue
  • Vibrant and with a “no job is to small!” attitude
  • Considerably cheaper than your daily rate! Let’s remember: they could be a “one man band” acting as marketing/sales/implementers.
  • They would typically spend most of their days working hard and capitalising on the Microsoft brand.
  • Will be “low touch” after initial customer deployment
  • They know what they are selling and how to say “No, it won’t do that!” – they are both smart and upfront
  • They may be your employees going solo and exploiting the new market

These new competitors may sound pesky to both you and I, but you need to really look at the opportunity afforded to them before we point fingers at them: they have been handed a great “All-In-One” solution, Dynamics 365 for Financials. This product bears the very recognisable and quality-assured Microsoft trademark! Microsoft Dynamics has a history spanning beyond 15 years in Microsoft’s ownership, together with a huge commitment for R&D and a clear roadmap. Integration features into the wider Microsoft stack are clearly a selling point against the likes of Sage 50, Xero, NetSuite and other cloud-based solutions.

They are seeing an opportunity that’s too good to be missed.

They are seeing an opportunity that’s too good to be missed. They know that they can leverage the Microsoft brand, Microsoft Cloud resilience and a simple “per user per month” pricing structure, together with tiered pricing which is both very appealing and easy to sell. They also understand that in order to be successful, they need to consider low overheads, high ROI when looking at the business model for their small enterprise. They have the determination to succeed and understand that investment does not need to come at a huge upfront cost. They don’t need expensive NAV Developers, nor Project Managers, nor a well-oiled Service Desk, although support will matter to potential customers and services remain key to profitability. “Does the prospect need a certain type of functionality? Let me check the Appstore and see what’s already there that I can resell to them?” would be their approach.

Dynamics 365 Acceleration Program
Are you a Microsoft Reseller who is looking for new growth possibilities and a way to honor the needs of your customers for an end-to-end solution.  Read more about this program

So what is my advise to you today? Start thinking of emulating their approach. Don’t let them gain grounds and outsell you. Think about how you could start a new line of business to go head-to-head with them.

Have I made you think already? Do you wish to find out more? I am happy to have a chat with you. Please feel free to contact me via email: aderosa@qbsgroup.com.

Are you using marketing as a panic button?

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If you are, you are definitely not alone. This is a very natural reaction when the order books are empty and your pipeline is dryer than the Kalahari desert during a dry spell… you panic!

 

And a natural place to run to in panic is to marketing – they must be able to do some kind of magic trick that makes new customers appear – almost like out of the blue – right? And you are also willing to turn up that discount lever to make those customers sign sooner rather than later.

We’ve all been there – using marketing as a kind of fire extinguisher to that burning pain of a hurting business, making everybody from marketing to sales frantically busy with getting that urgent direct mail out – and the entire company getting involved in that “all hands on deck” calling day, where no stone is left unturned.

The fact is – that all the while this hectic activity is taking place – chances are, the business is slowly recuperating – not as a result of the instant activity – but more likely because seeds were planted months ago, that is then coming to realization. So while everybody goes “phew – we kept the business a float with our quick thinking” – all people think to themselves “how on earth did that happen?”. Because that’s what marketing is all about: that long term haul, intelligently considering the right time and audience for the right messages, that will make customers come to realize their needs and pains – and slowly but surely turn to you for advice. The best approach is rarely to just bulldozer the market.

“Well – but this way we get to pick the low hanging fruits” the counter argument normally goes….

And I know the term “low hanging fruits” is a much loved term by all business owners – because who doesn’t just want to stroll around, picking those low hanging fruits? But who says you can’t pick those fruits while at the same time preparing the soil for the long term growth and crop?

Most of us agree to the fact that customers are on a buying journey (see former QBS article on buying journey here) – so how come we insist on a selling “moment”?

Marketing takes time and effort – and it begins with you knowing your own business. Answering these 3 big questions:

  1. Where are you today?
    (who are your customers, and what does your product solve with customers are some of the sub questions here that are painfully important to understand)
  2. What are you doing right now?
    (is your website performing as it should, are you active on social media, have you activated any campaign automations…or are you still relying on your sales people finding their own next potential customer themelves?)
  3. Where do you want your company to go?
    (picture your company in 2,5,10 years’ time – where do you want to be?)

Can bring you the insight needed in order to come to the right decisions around marketing for your business that supports your strategic goals – not just the one-off hit’n’run activity of a panicking organisation. Invite the important stakeholders in your company and do a thorough strategy workshop on marketing for your business – this way all the people that need to get behind the marketing strategy gets heard – and you get a concrete plan to work from. See example of workshop agenda here for inspiration.

 

Having a thoroughly worked through marketing plan in place that supports your long term strategy will also make it possible for you to avoid those situations where you get all hyped up about the next big trend within marketing – that one thing that everybody tells you that you must adopt or die… Because if this new hot trend doesn’t support your strategic goals, then it’s probably not suitable for you to pick up – hot trend or not. (read more in this article about why hot trends should not be followed blindly). Investing the time to do this will pay off in so many ways – you will not be spending marketing budget blindly, and you will be able to adjust, if you don’t see the results that you’ve identified in plan coming in – because you know what you are doing – and why.

Then – if you have done the hard work of considering your strategy for marketing – and set in place the appropriate activities to support your business in the long run – then there’s always room for that occasional panic action, that we all know can’t be avoided every once in a while….

If you need help to kickstart this process or to facilitate it – get in touch with QBS group – we have long term expertise in helping our partners reflect on their business and their marketing strategy – resulting in concrete executable marketing plans. Send a mail to marketing@qbsgroup.com – and we will get back to you right away.

PS. This applies also in part for businesses that targets customers with commodity items, though here you might argue that short term marketing activities at times have their purpose, as you have shorter sales cycles and shorter life cycles of products. But in the discipline of selling business process solutions, short term marketing is never best path.

Partnerships will no longer be an option

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In a recent presentation I saw from Microsoft, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft released more than 600 new features and services in Azure. You look at Office 365 and you also see a huge number of new features and capabilities. Dynamics 365 Business Edition will then follow a similar pattern of providing new features and capabilities on monthly bases. You add the opportunities and innovation you can drive by using Microsoft Flow and Power Apps and you are dealing with an amount of innovation that is almost impossible to embrace.

I think managing innovation becomes a new capability that we need to build as partners. It starts before one can learn and internalise innovation. You need to be clear about what business objectives your customers have and how IT innovation can enable scenarios that will accomplish these objectives. It is no longer a rather straightforward approach where you add capabilities over time within the same product platform. It is a constant process, transforming your customer business scenarios into a technology map. Starting at the highest level, whether they benefit from data cloud, productivity cloud or business cloud or combination of the 3. Then it specifies workload areas and then finally can touch upon certain services and product capabilities.

It also indicates, that you might not be able to master the relevant innovations yourself. In this context, partnerships will no longer be an option, they become a life blood to your future. Starting to build a network that can be accessed whenever innovation sitting outside of your competence becomes relevant for one of your customers scenarios, is becoming a foundation of our business just like operations or marketing. I am convinced that Dynasource is the best available network and platform to establish these types of partnerships and to enable capabilities to benefit from a huge range of innovation.

Having a trusted advisor who not only understands the business challenges and opportunities, but who can also map and integrate IT innovation on an ongoing basis, becomes critical.

I also think it is the right moment to bring in young talent into your practice. Most of us have internalised the client server architecture and cloud architecture a while back (which is a polite way to admit that I am getting old), I would argue that IT graduates look at these innovations in a fresh way and will likely explore and benefit in ways that we might not be aware. This is why I applaud initiatives like Generation Z that our team is driving in UK. Bringing in fresh talent to our network.

The positive side of this is that managing innovation for customers becomes the key to differentiate yourself and create customer loyalty. In times of cloud services, standardisation is decreasing the opportunity to differentiate through functionality. Customers will look at more and more functionality that comes from cloud services as being a commodity. But having a trusted advisor who not only understands the business challenges and opportunities, but who can also map and integrate IT innovation on an ongoing basis, becomes critical. If we believe the scale and complexity of innovation is hard to manage for us as Dynamics Partners, then it is even harder for most of our customers. They will rely on you to explore available and upcoming innovations and how these can benefit their business.

At QBS group, we also change the way we deal with the massive amount of innovation and opportunity ahead of us. We have established the role of a Cloud Solution Architect, a senior person that looks across the 3 Microsoft clouds and 3rd party innovation, making sure we can provide guidance and insights to our partners. We also intensified our investments to provide the right learning platform, through a Learning Management System. And we want to provide more platforms for partners to share their learnings and insight on innovation, so we live up to our promise that we have the best informed partners. We understand, with the amount of innovation ahead of us, we cannot trust on us alone to embrace technology and translate that into customer benefits and loyalty. Sign up now and become a QBS group partner.

Optimizing your resources as QBS partner with ForNAV

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Leusden, 5th May, 2017 – ForNAV, a relatively new company with decades of NAV experience, announced on April 18th a partnership with QBS, to drive more business opportunities within the QBS partner base. With the combined power of the tools of ForNAV and the experience of industry veterans such as Michael Nielsen, Jan Sillemann, Jacob Reinholdt Rasmussen and Mark Brummel, partners can easily overcome obstacles when creating and upgrading reports for Dynamics NAV.

The Reports ForNAV Converter makes going from classic reports to RDLC fast and easy. It enables reports developed for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 and NAV 2009 (also known as “classic” or C/SIDE reports) to run on newer versions that require the RDLC format.

For creating and modifying reports for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the Reports ForNAV Designer is an easy-to-use tool. If you are familiar with the C/SIDE reporting tool, you can start working with the Reports ForNAV Designer instantly.

For the partners of QBS, this is another way to focus on delivering high-value services to customers, letting smart tools improve efficiency by automating some of the day-to-day work. This partnership is also another example of the services to help partners with the optimization of their resources. And this is why QBS has negotiated a 50% introduction discount for QBS partners, when combined with the use of the Dynamics Upgrade Services.

The long-term strategic relationship between ForNAV and QBS will focus on driving the use of ForNAV tools by new partners and end-users.

Jan Sillemann – ForNAV
“Working with QBS will help us reach more partners. Faster. And thereby help customers take advantage of the new innovation in Dynamics NAV more efficiently.”

Michael Hartmann – CEO QBS group
“We are glad to offer another solution that helps partners focus on delivering high-level services and support the transition to a repeatable business model.”

For more information, visit www.fornav.com/ and www.qbsgroup.com/marketplace/ForNAV

What is the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (Microsoft CSP)

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Microsoft wants partners to take full advantage of their opportunity in the cloud, so they introduced the Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP).

The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP) enables partners to directly manage their entire Microsoft cloud customer lifecycle. Partners in this program utilize dedicated in-product tools to directly provision, manage, and support their customer subscriptions. Partners can easily package their own tools, products and services, and combine them into one monthly or annual customer bill.

Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program

This program helps Microsoft partners become their customers’ trusted advisors. Because by using CSP, partners are able to own and manage the end-to-end relationship with their customers.

CSP versions; Direct and Indirect

There are two versions of CSP, the Direct (Tier 1) model and the Indirect (Tier 2) model. Partners have to choose at least one model. They can also choose both.

Microsoft Cloud solution provider

The difference between the Direct CSP model and the Indirect CSP model is that the Direct model requires a robust infrastructure to enable end-to-end ownership of the customer relationship. There are a lot of requirements to be met and for most partners this isn’t feasible. The Indirect model however, offers partners (resellers) the opportunity to work with an Indirect CSP partner who can provide the tools and resources necessary to manage their customer relationship. And for most of them, this is the best option.

You need to decide

More and more Microsoft cloud solutions can only be sold through the CSP model, so partners need to decide. Dynamics 365 for example will not become part of the Dynamics pricelist, but will only be available via CSP.

ERP should we look for a new abbreviation

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In the nineties, we were introduced to a new abbreviation: ERP, or “Enterprise Resource Planning”. The term was devised at about the time of the stormy growth of Job, SAP, etc .. Even Microsoft used the term after the acquisition of, among others, Axapta and Navision.

Now, 20 years on from the emergence of ERP, new (cloud) providers have recognized that ERP solutions need to be part of a more integrated platform and adapt their current way of working to consider open and flexible solutions.

So that raises the question; Should we still refer to ERP in same context? Should we find another term or continue with the same abbreviation, but with new definition? Might we suggest using the terms below!

E = Enterprise or Eco-system

When we refer to Enterprise, you can associate images that sums up the definition of the phrase such as a company name, a location (with a parking lot, often an entrance gate and a reception). More often something tangible. In recent years, companies are becoming part of an increasingly virtual world and now their demand is to participate in an eco system of suppliers, partners and customers. ‘Physical boundaries are removed, doing everything yourself is almost certainly not an option for a business and they need external support.’ Enterprise as we know it does not exist anymore; The eco system determines the success. I therefore suggest that we keep the ‘E’, but with a new definition!

R = Resources

Even when it comes to Resources, we immediately think of traditional definitions: employees on the payroll, office equipment, inventory in the warehouse, etc… Is this still the case? As a term, Resource has changed since it was first used in this context. Organizations are now increasingly working with a flexible contractor list, the stock is demand driven, production is outsourced, etc. The ‘R’ may remain, but we should have the underlying realization that we are increasingly talking about Resources that are outside our own organization. With that in mind, can my current business application support this? Or does it limit me to gain insight into all the resources in my eco system?

P = Planning

Under the ‘P’ of ‘Planning’ organizations assume some kind of sense of certainty when it comes to the near and distant future. Planning is time consuming and once again completed. In today’s business climate, we are expected to respond almost instantly to changes outside and within our organization. We collect continuous data and if we do not collect the data that we need, unwanted questions will be asked. Any solution can record data and have alerts but then what. What do we do with that data? How can we arrange the analysis to get the right data from that information? Can my current business application handle all that data? What does my performance do? How do I solve that and what impact does it have on my planning process?

Many questions; The answer lies in an unconditional quest for predictability. Predictability must be embedded in our business processes. Collecting data and converting it into available real-time and accurate information is crucial. Organizations that are well-organized are ready for the future and further growth. Will the term ‘planning’ continue to be used? Possibly not. Let’s just go for ‘Predictability’.

Conclusion

Good news: We can continue to use the abbreviation ‘ERP’. However, with new words that fit the time we live now. From now on we are talking about ‘Eco-system Resource Predictability’. Whether we agree to change the phrase is just a question; what matters right now is what our businesses demand from our applications!

Dynamics 365 Business Edition: Opportunity or Threat

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Microsoft will be launching Dynamics 365 Business Edition in Europe in 2017 – starting with the UK and then rolling out to other countries.

Within the channel, we all recognise that the world of business applications has changed dramatically. With Microsoft embracing the concept of a true SaaS business application suite of software, what will be the impact on existing business models and existing Dynamics NAV and CRM partners? Does every partner need to completely re-engineer their P&L, Cashflow and Balance Sheet to succeed in a Dynamics 365 world? Can we carry on regardless? After speaking with dozens of VARs and ISVs, QBS group is in a unique position to feedback and analyse the views of both our channel partners and the potential impacts of Dynamics 365.

Join Will McIntee to listen to his views on some of the considerations that could or should be taken into account when thinking about Dynamics 365!

The Capacity Dilemma; Short-term Solutions Available!

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In one of the recent partner meetings, the nightmare of every channel marketing person came true: The partner was refusing to take more leads! It was not because the quality of the leads was bad, nor was the partner thinking the leads would be overprized. He simply denied, because he had no more capacity to follow up on new projects.

I think many of our partners have been in such a situation. They can’t simply take on more customers, because capacity is limited and they don’t want to compromise on quality.

Of course, this is a difficult situation and in the past years, I have seen many initiatives to create new capacity by nurturing talents at universities and driving graduates to get into the Business Application space. While this is the right investment in our future, most of these initiatives are more long-term time and typically do not scale as required. Arguably Microsoft invests in product development to make sure the new generation of Dynamics 365 products are faster to implement and therefore do not consume as much capacity.

Want to get inspired by a success story about moving to the cloud?
Read Get yourself a niche, in order to be successful

Yet in the past few months, we have seen 2 great solutions that can have short term impact on our partner’s capacity and that are scalable.

Upgrade services

Most projects do not start from scratch, typically customers have an existing solution for ERP or CRM that they want to migrate to more modern platforms. A huge part of such migration projects is time consuming, low value work that consumes precious time of consultants and technical people. With companies such as 1 Click Factory, QBS group is now offering Dynamics Upgrade service, so you can outsource most of the low value, high time consumption work and focus your people on the high value work. From first cases, we get very positive feedback that partners can free up capacity drastically, while saving cost at same time.

Once partners are following that simple structure, they can see how much capacity can be gained.

Yet this approach requires that the partner structures the project on a new dimension, what parts are low level workloads to be outsources vs. the ones that should still be in-house. Once partners are following that simple structure, they can see how much capacity can be gained by using outsourced services such as our upgrade offerings

Resource Optimisation

All of our partners are profiled in Dynasource, which is a new marketplace to share IT projects and talents. So you can either offer a project where you need additional capacity or you need expertise that you don’t have in-house or in case you have resources available, you can shop for projects and “rent out” your resources to other partners. Like with all disruptive business models, there is an initial reservation. Can I trust the person I source in? Can I make sure that my most valuable resources are not hired by another partner? It’s all a matter of trust and leaving one’s comfort zone. However, with first projects being handled through the Dynasource platform, we see the early movers in our community creating instant capacity through this model.

Dynasource offers you the possibility to hire experienced subject matter experts for existing projects or new projects.

I am convinced that if our partners are taking advantage of both options to create capacity, they will enjoy a larger customer base and higher profits. And in the end, what was the nightmare of a channel marketing person, to have partners reject leads because of capacity constraints, will become confined to history 😊. If you want to know more about these services and how we can help you to create capacity and enlarge your customer base, please contact one of our regional offices or send me an email.

Michael Hartmann

Dynamic Communities NAVUG can help NAV Partners to build a Stronger Relationship with their Clients

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Two months ago, I was contacted by The NAV User Group (NAVUG) with the request if QBS and her partners and end customers had an interest to join the coming Summit EMEA in Amsterdam.

My first reaction was NO, our partners do not see the value of a NAV user group and will see this as a business threat when exposing end customers to other competing partners also attending Summit EMEA. But after having a couple of internal discussions and also with some QBS partners I started to re-think my first reaction and thinking what business benefit could this bring to our partners when jointly attending or referring your end customers to Summit EMEA in Amsterdam on April the 4-6.

As you know we at QBS group, are always looking at how we can improve our partners’ businesses and therefore I wanted to reach out to each of you and share my thoughts, ideas and start some discussion on why you as a (QBS) NAV partner should attend Summit EMEA and what benefits this might bring you.

Benefit I: Show your customer, that you dare to facilitate and act beyond

So when exposing your customers into the NAVUG you give them the chance to provide feedback to the NAV Microsoft product teams and give them a platform to exchange thoughts, ideas or express the worries they have. But above all it will show the customers that you dare to facilitate and act beyond just acting as  a trusted IT advisor.

Benefit II: Create a Long term Relationship

A Long term Relationship with your customers is the most valuable thing you can have as these customers will give you the best recurring revenue and profit. But this will mean that the customer needs to be willing to change and adapt to new technology. What better platform than Summit EMEA to hear all the new exciting stuff from the vendor but above all let peers tell about success of new technologies and which benefits it brought to them. So when driving home from the event you should have multiple upsell and cross-sell leads to be discussing for the coming weeks and create a great (quickly created) pipeline.

Benefit III: Get Customers feedback

By learning and being close to all the new IT developments from the Microsoft teams you can immediately sense the feedback from the customers in the room. What better proof for you to make a company business decision on where to invest in when it comes direct from the source, the end customer!

Benefit IV: The NAVUG is your USP

The NAVUG could be used as a Unique Selling Point and even a differentiator in every new sales engagement. It can be perceived as a comfort and a safe haven in the knowledge that there is an end user NAV platform where they can discuss with peers, learn from others’ experiences and ask opinions and feedback. After all “one of the most important things in sales is all about taking away distrust and uncertainties at the customer side” and this could be just that last customer concern in order to propel  yourself to the next sales round or win the deal.

 

So, I really hope and trust that you will be signing up and take this opportunity to learn from the sessions, spend valuable time with your customer and that this will become a meaningful future platform to build on and for you to make the right future business investments around Dynamics NAV/Dynamics365 for more future success.

And do not forget that Amsterdam is also a great city to spend time in and enjoy the diversity it can give you and your customers.

Part 3 – Microsoft Dynamics Development Preview

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Microsoft released during last Christmas an Azure Virtual Machine where you can play around with the new Development Environment. This is the third blog about the development environment. Please read my previous blogs before you continue with this one. This blog will describe the way you can create a new role center.

For this blog I have used the February update. Additional information about this update can be found on the NAV Team Blog.

If you have already installed a previous preview version, please remove the complete Azure resource group, and create a new VM.

The deployment will start and will take some time to finish. In the end, you will see the VM with additional stuff.

I copied the sources from previous month to a local folder and started Visual Studio code.

When I selected the working folder I got a warning message and I was not able to compile the solution from previous month.

Hmmm, something changed 🙁

I looked around on the DVD and there was no NAV resource files located in C:\Demo\Nav Developer Experience\Resources as requested in the app.json file.

Ok, how do I get those resources? Well I found an installation PowerShell script and executed it.

That trick worked and the resource files where copied to my working folder.

After hitting [F5] the solution compiled, but that was not all, the NAV web client started automatically, very nice done Guys!

Now the solution is working and the web client opens automatically it’s time to add a new Role Center to show our solution information.

I always create a development Role Center to display and test the added functionality.

There is a perfect MSDN blog how you create a Role Center.

The first step is to create the activity or cue table.
To keep this blog simple I just added one cue that displays the open sales orders.

The cue information should be displayed in the card page.

There are a few things that you should be aware of:

  • the card type should be CardPart
  • the group must be a cue group. Otherwise you won’t see any cues in the role center
  • It is a setup table, thus the OnOpenPage trigger should insert a record.

This cue page is added to the role center page.

That’s the code for today. Hit [F5] and compile the solution.

The web client will start and you have to change the profile and user personalisation. I had to restart the service tier but then I got the correct Role Center.

Get yourself a niche, in order to be successful

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At QBS group we believe that our partners deserve the best; the best support, the best software and the best stories. This time we have asked one of our UK partners Elite Dynamics to share their thoughts and experiences with you on their journey to the cloud. On a rainy afternoon we spoke with Jamaine Campbell and asked him what he would suggest others who want to start their cloud business.

Jamaine Campbell on Elite Dynamics

We started Elite Dynamics back in November 2015. Before that I was already working as a Sales & Marketing Manager, Implementation support for a NAV bases vertical for the UK Caravan & holiday park- industry. In the UK alone there are approximately 4000 of these parks. As many of them are quite small the large investment for a full on-premise NAV suite surely narrowed the potential market.  I already wished to start the deployment of this software in an app, but the MD did not share my vision, so I set up a team with like-minded people who understood that the market is shifting. We changed the way we deploy our solutions and we can rely on Azure infrastructure services via QBS, which allows us to focus on the software components.

In order to have our solution implemented in more organisations than my previous employer did in the previous ten years, the answer was a simple rapid deployment of both the database, implementation but equally the back-end servers and associated services. How do we remove the CAPEX costs? The answer is simple: put it in the cloud! Our future is not in concentrating on such large implementations, but in deploying the same solution over and over again.

Our customers

We currently have 9 customers in both the UK as well as Canada, we can tackle both the lengthier on- premise implementations as well as the fast cloud implementations. Over half of our current customers use our solution in the cloud. We expect this to be a larger percentage in the future.

We distinguish between three types of customers: the large ones who own their own IT department, have the CAPEX budget to invest in the terminal servers, SQL servers, the hardware, etc. and often have a quite complex network which involves multiple applications that need to be integrated. They will usually go for the on-premise solution, because they have the infrastructure in place, support and they have the IT budget.

The second type of customers could be easily as large, but they do not have the IT budget nor the infrastructure in place, nor do they wish to put that amount of money into it. They are happy to have the software solution delivered to them as a pure app. In December 2015 we already had a request from a customer in Canada and within 1 day we managed to spin their server up. In a day we got them from zero to deployment and having their database up and running.

The third type of customer we identify is a multi-tenanted environment, the smaller of the vacation and caravan parks. They just want an affordable “off-the-shelf” solution, a pure hosted service. Elite Dynamics is pioneering with this multi-tenant environments.

Find yourself a niche market

By focusing on a specific industry it allows you to understand the requirements of that industry, to better understand your barriers, your constraints but also your USP’s. Having a niche market is surely helping us to gain such a great market position in a short period of time.

We still see many partners who focus on everything, but we believe actually finding and fully grasping a niche market is the way forward.

We still see many partners who focus on everything, but we believe actually finding and fully grasping a niche market is the way forward. It surely helps if no competitors have selected this market yet and if there is a budget to be spent on your solution. After the UK market we are also looking at other native English speaking areas, such as Canada, United States and New Zealand.

Removing the cost of infrastructure

If you are looking for a quick implementation at a lower entry point, you need to remove the cost of infrastructure: in many cases the cost of infrastructure can be greater than the Dynamics NAV and server licenses. In a marketspace that is already sensitive to price, doubling the cost is not an option. The whole NAV environment is a lot more technical then it was 10 years ago, also adding additional costs for support. Remove the requirements, skills and knowledge around the infrastructure.  Let that whole 24/7 uptime become somebody else’s problem, as well as the whole SQL licensing part and focus on delivering a NAV application as an app.

Take the emotions out of it

When moving from on-premise to cloud, you have to make sure you take the emotions out of it. ERP is all about emotion and on-premise is well established over decades. It somehow acts as a “comfort blanket”. People prefer to have 50 servers in a room over having 1000 servers in a well secured and temperature-controlled area.

For us moving to a cloud-based model was a logical step.  Out of the 4000 caravan and holiday parks only 20 could afford the investment in hardware, software and support that is needed in an on- premise situation.

Some final words

We feel we have a responsibility to our staff, our customers as well as to ourselves to do the right thing. In our vision we want to stay focused on quality over quantity and focus on what we do best. We believe this will help us grow and be the dominant player in the UK market in a few years as well as open up the international market of caravan and holiday parks.  We could not have done this without the help of QBS and in our case the help of Andy De Rosa, our Channel Manager. He is there for us when we need him. Having a trusted partner such as QBS surely helps us a lot.

Want to become successful in the cloud with Dynamics 365?
Start now with the Dynamics 365 Acceleration Program.

eXtreme 365 EMEA 2017 Business Report

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The 2017 edition of eXtreme 365 EMEA is expected to be an interesting edition. Today, the world of a Dynamics CRM partner is changing faster than ever before. Being a Dynamics CRM partner today is like dancing on a volcano – far from boring! And the recent announcements around the Dynamics 365 solution makes this effect even stronger!

The EMEA edition picked Lisbon as their 2017 location. It will be organized from March 13th till 15th for the partner event and on March 16th and 17th for end-users. This last part is new and anticipates to fill the gap that has emerged after Microsoft stopped with Convergence.

Due to the release of Dynamics 365 last year, the eXtreme organization decided to change the name of the event from ‘eXtreme CRM’ into ‘eXtreme 365’

Over 600 partners will attend eXtreme 365 EMEA in Lisbon. That’s an all-time high score! If you’re a visitor yourself, an interesting question is how you will bring all these messages back home. Because it’s crucial that all your team members understand what’s going on. And more important – what that all means to them!

Here’s where QBS group can help you out. We will write a business report on eXtreme 365. With 3 authors we will cover more sessions than a single partner normally can do. The sessions that we will cover go ‘cross content’. This means that we will not only cover the keynotes, but also various technical and functional sessions and of course also the business sessions.

On top of that we will publish exclusive interviews that we will have in Lisbon with these Microsoft executives:

  • Tony de Freitas – Director Dynamics Partner Strategy
  • Param Kahlon – General Manager of Program Management, Dynamics 365
  • Satish Thomas – Group Program Manager, Microsoft Appsource

The report will be published in the English language and will be available by the beginning of April 2017.

At QBS group we’ve been writing business reports for Microsoft Dynamics partners on Microsoft’s WPC and DIRECTIONS since 2004.

QBS group partners will receive this report for free as part of their membership. Partners who sign up as a QBS group partner before April 1st, 2017 will get a FREE copy as their welcome present. Non-QBS partners pay only € 350,- exclusive VAT to receive a copy.

This unique and valuable report is bought by leading Dynamics partners from all over the world.

Can you afford to miss on this important business report?

Part 2 – Microsoft Dynamics Development Preview

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Microsoft released during last Christmas an Azure Virtual Machine where you can play around with the new Development Environment.

This is the second blog about the development environment. If you want to know how to create your environment, please read my first blog on this subject.

This blog will describe the way you can create new tables and pages.

For this blog I have used the January update. Additional information about this update can be found on the NAV Team Blog.

To get started I removed a complete resource group, and create a new VM.
You can download a new VM here.

The deployment will start and will take some time to finish. In the end, you will see the VM with additional stuff.

 

Start an RDP session and open Visual Studio Code.

To create a new package execute the following steps:

  • Create a new folder
  • Select this folder in Visual Studio Code
  • Create a new file called “HotelSetup.al”
  • Create app.json file
    Hit [F5] and update the app.json file. Store it on a safe place (preferably in a source control system like TFS or GIT) because the ID is unique and should be used throughout the life cycle of your product.

Update the development environment (the list is displayed in the top of the window)

  • Create launch.json file
    Hit [F5] again and the launch.json file will be created
  • As you will see in the output window the empty package file is created

Our package is ready and now it is time to add some code. As you saw I created a new file hotelsetup.al this should contain a NAV setup file.

In the old development environment this was easy:

Well in the new development, it is also quite simple. When you type ‘ttable’ and press enter the table snippet will be executed and the table framework will be there.

Now, it is up to you to create the code, there is not much changed here, it is plain and simple AL as you are used to.

I gave the table a number and name, added the fields and update the primary key information.

Next step is to create the properties like Caption ML and table relations. Just start typing and you will see the snippets.

At the end you will have a perfect created table and you can press [F5] to publish your app.

 

Next step is to create the setup page. In the old development environment it is done via the page wizard.

In the new development environment use the ‘tpage’ snippet to create a page framework.

It takes some time, but in the end you will get the job done.

So finished?

Not really, it is a setup table. You need to add code to the OnOpenPage trigger and to the Company Initialization codeunit.

The OnOpenPage trigger is the same as you are used to.

And now the fun part: make an extension to Codeunit 2 Company Initialize.

This is only possible in the January version!

Hit [F5] to publish the app and you are done!

Meet QBS group at eXtreme 365 EMEA 2017!

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It’s only a few weeks until the start of the most important Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 Sales & Marketing partner event in the EMEA region: eXtreme 365 2017. The event will be organized in beautiful Lisbon from March 13th-15th (partner event) and March 16th-17th (end-user event).

Value Add Distributor QBS group is silver sponsor at this event. With over 375 Dynamics NAV partners in 17 countries, QBS group is the biggest partner eco-system in the Dynamics world. In Lisbon, we will present ourselves for the first time to the Dynamics CRM channel where we aim to play this Value Add role as well. We will do this together with our strategic partners Dynasource and MindsUnited. The three of us share a booth on the information market and deliver a series of sessions that might be interesting for you.

Here’s an overview:

We will start with a side-kick role in the session of Microsoft’s WE lead Ingmar Boon on Tuesday afternoon at 2:15 pm, called ‘Building your SMB practice leveraging CSP’.

The second presentation will be delivered by Guus Krabbenborg on Wednesday morning at 8:30 am and is about the partner business side of the new Dynamics 365 solution. The title of his session is ‘This is what Dynamics CRM partners need to change to become successful with Dynamics 365!’.

The third session is one delivered by Peter Vach from Dynasource. The title of this session is ‘Why Have 2500 Microsoft Partners Already Signed Up to Collaborate?’.

And the fourth presentation on Wednesday afternoon at 4:45 pm is again a side-kick role in another session of Ingmar Boon, called ‘Dynamics 365 Sales in SMB – Partner Roundtable’.

Lastly, Guus Krabbenborg will lead a session in the Executive Exchange track on Wednesday, named ‘Build your Business Models’

We also have a booth, number 9, where we can answer all your questions about the new CSP program and how we can support the growth of your Dynamics 365 business. We are more than happy to explain why QBS partners perform substantially better than non-QBS partners.

Curious what you can expect from this conference? Same here! That’s why we wrote this pre-view article for you: ‘What Dynamics CRM partners can expect from eXtreme 365 EMEA 2017’.

Finally, we will publish a business report on this event. After publishing these reports on Microsoft’s WPC for the past 12 years, and on DIRECTIONS EMEA last year, this will be the first year that we will write such a document on the eXtreme event. With a team of expert authors, we will cover most of the sessions – both commercial, technical and functional. The result is a great read for you as visitor. But maybe even more important – a fantastic document to inform your colleagues back home! Our mantra is ‘QBS partners are the best-informed Microsoft Partners!’

This report is available for free for all the QBS partners as part of their membership. Non-QBS partners can buy a copy for only EURO 350 excluding VAT. More details at the QBS booth.

See you all in Lisbon in March!

Guus Krabbenborg

Democratizing Enterprise Solution

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While I was checking our last revenue numbers for a board meeting, using Microsoft PowerBI, I was reminded how much democratization happened in IT solutions over last 2 decades.

As a company, QBS group is a small business, with 45 employees working across Europe. Yet we are benefiting from Business Intelligence that 20 years back, only large enterprises could afford, if at all. As result, I can take decision faster, deciding where we need to invest, I can learn better, comparing results of subsidiaries and analyzing details of our performance.

One critical element to provide enterprise solution to SMB, are partners like the ones in our QBS group network. As the name ERP implies, many business solutions were invented with enterprises in mind, yet with the relentless work you have done over the past years, more and more small and medium business are now enjoying the benefits of IT based resource planning, financials or customer relationship management. Of course, Microsoft has kick started that phenomenon by providing scalable platforms like NAV or SQL server and dropping prices to an affordable level. But you as partner should take pride in being the one that actually made it happen, with each customer you were activating for NAV or CRM. Not only did companies benefit, all people working in the NAV or CRM environment became more productive and enjoyed less cumbersome, routine work. In these time of fast changing technology and business objectives, it is easy to forget what has been accomplished. I suggest, you should take a moment and celebrate your achievement.

But arguably, we just getting started. The penetration of modern business application in SMB is still low, especially if we look at the S, the small businesses in SMB. While Office 365 is getting predominant productivity tool in SMB for new deployments, still the majority of SMB’s installed base is using an onprem, legacy version of Office. But market prediction show, that vast majority of SMB’s will go to the Office SaaS offering in next 3-5 years and if they do, the next logical step is to also deploy a modern business application as a SaaS offering. Research company AMI partners sees the SaaS market for ERP and SMB in SMB to be 1.7 Billion $ in Western Europe alone.

I might be simplifying, but to accelerate the adoption of enterprise type business application in SMB, and therefore take a share in that 1.7 Billion business,  it takes 3 main steps

  1. An affordable, simple to activate platform that can integrate business productivity as well as business processes – Microsoft is providing that with Dynamics 365 Business Edition
  2. A process that connects customer prospects for business solution with sellers. We are heavily investing in that process with our Take-the-Lead program. As QBS we generate interest for SMB’s in modern business applications and then qualify these prospect and hand them over to our partners.
  3. Making configuration for business application still requires services that can hardly be done in a self service model. Also making sure that business processes are correctly reflected in the business application and that these processes are being optimized is something you can hardly automate. That is why at the end of the day, you as Dynamcis partners are still the “last mile” to customer success and to further democratize business application.

So, there is a lot to be proud of and even more to be excited about for the next years when it comes to SMB’s and business application. At QBS group, we want support you in the best possible way to become part of that future. Our upcoming QBShares are an ideal platform to have that dialogue. I will do my best to participate in all of them, in Birmingham UK, Leusden Netherlands, in Germany, Denmark and Spain. I  am looking forward to see you there.

Michael Hartmann