What is your Top-5 Microsoft Dynamics capacity killers?

Well regarded, Microsoft Dynamics partners are capacity organizations. For most of these partners, selling time is the core of their business. And just like hotels have with rooms and airlines with seats, a consultancy day that is not sold will never return. So it makes sense to analyze how and where Dynamics partners lose their precious capacity.

Here’s my personal top-5, in random order:

1. Inefficient customer acquisition process

Most Dynamics partners have far too high Customer Acquisition Cost due to long sales cycles (no methodology, no formal process, no KPI’s), due to long pipelines without focus and due to a bad timing of the lead hand-over from marketing to sales

2. Poor lead-to-order conversion rate

In general, Dynamics partners are optimistic people. Their glasses are always half full. So they often participate in sales cycles where the best result they can achieve is the silver medal. That results in a direct loss of scarce sales and pre-sales capacity.

3. Fixed price projects based on inaccurate assumptions

Often due to winning deals on unknown territories, many partners offer fixed price projects based on incorrect assumptions. As a direct result, they are spending parts of their valuable and scarce capacity without even getting paid for! Isn’t that a pity?

4. Delivering inefficient upgrades

Over the years, upgrade services have grown into a real specialization area. However, the average Microsoft Dynamics partner still delivers upgrades without methodology, with a lack of sophisticated automation tools and not rarely with unmotivated consultants who of course prefer to implement new technologies at net new customers.

5. Hiring specialists without enough projects

Microsoft’s constant stream of innovation creates a dilemma. Naturally, it’s great for a partner to hire a specialist in Power BI, IoT, machine Learning or Cortana Intelligence. But you will lose both valuable capacity and money if you don’t have enough projects where this new employee can work on. After all, having your talented and expensive people waiting on the bench is not really attractive, right?

So do you know your own top-5?

Need some help?

At QBS group we’re fully focused on helping Microsoft Dynamics partners all over the world to grow their revenue and at the same time lower their cost. Helping partners to get rid of their biggest capacity killers is of course part of that mission.

Here’s my believe on how our services can help you use your capacity in a more effective way:

1. Customer acquisition process. We offer specific training courses and individual partner coaching to help you structure your customer acquisition process. Result: improved efficiency at a lower cost level
2. Lead-to-order conversion rate. We can help you to become a (more) specialized partner through our training courses and partner coaching. On top of that we can also teach you to pronounce the one most difficult word for sales people…..  Result: you will stop losing time in sales cycles that will never pay off.
3. Fixed price projects. We provide you with smart tools and methods for both sales people and project managers to protect your business against delivering capacity for free. Result: smarter offerings at a lower risk
4. Inefficient upgrades. We’ve recently introduced a new service, called ‘Upgrade as a Service’. With this service you can outsource your upgrade project at fixed price to real specialists, who consider upgrades as their core business. Result: you can offer cheaper upgrades with a nice margin at a lower risk. Even more important: you unlock your own capacity to implement (more) new customers.
5. Underutilization. Together with our strategic partner Dynasource (www.dynasource.com), a partner-to-partner marketplace for IT sourcing, we help you better balance your capacity needs. You can easily find the expertise and resources you’re missing and offer your over-capacity to other partners. Result: higher utilization of your resources and potentially more project deliveries.

Are you a Microsoft Dynamics partner? And do you want to stay successful in the future? Then you’d better analyze your own capacity killers. And find ways to avoid them.

Every non-billable hour that you can turn into a billable one adds direct to your bottom-line. Any idea how 2% extra utilization will impact your EBITDA result? Or 5%?

At QBS group we’re more than happy to support you in that important process. So please feel free to reach out to your local QBS group contacts or directly to me to discuss how we can help you become more efficient in monetizing your valuable capacity even better.

Guus Krabbenborg