Michael Hartmann shares his vision for 2017

When it comes to mission statements, simplicity is king in my view. When founded, QBS created a simple, but strong mission statement:

Our partnership is about increasing our partners revenue and lowering their cost.

I am confident that this will remain the essence of what we want to be: The organization that puts business success of its partners as the north star. Everything we do, all services we provide must have one goal on top: Making our partners, our customers, become more profitable over time.

Yet the challenges have shifted for the Dynamics channel. While in the beginning of QBS, ERP in cloud was more buzz than reality, more and more customers are now asking for a cloud solution, to gain flexibility and lower cost of ownership. As we all know, this is a different business model and requires a complementary go-to-market. Key word being “complementary”. The NAV on prem business is not going away. As research company AMI predicts, ERP On premise will stay at current revenue level, growing only 1%, but still being the dominant deployment method for ERP, even in 2019.

As Paul White, GM of Dynamics, clearly articulates in his video to the QBS team during our kick-off early January, we need to support our partners in driving profitability out of existing NAV business to have muscles to then complement with a solid cloud business based on Dynamics 365.

In order to do that, we want to provide our partners with added value services around training, sales and backoffice support as well license and operations. Yet the highest impact on our mission to increase their revenue going forward should come from helping them get onto modern marketing platforms, providing them with sales qualified leads for customer acquisition. This is why we introduce our program called “Take the Lead”. For our partners to maximize their revenue opportunity today, our partners have to add customers at a constant pace. And rather than leaving this entirely on their shoulders – we are stepping up and providing the lead generating “locomotive” that they can attach themselves to. In our latest survey, our partners also confirmed that marketing services are top of mind for them.

Looking ahead, we are fully committed to Microsoft cloud strategy on Dynamics 365. We believe that our partner eco system has the capabilities to create Dynamics 365 apps that will dramatically reduce the sales cycle and activation process for business application in SMB. Our updated OneBizz range of products will become a strategic asset in turning your existing IP into a Dynamics 365 app. In addition, our channel partners will face competition not only from other ERP or CRM solution reseller, but also from solution providers that come from business productivity or collaboration perspective. Rather than wait until you face that competition on your home base, we will work with our partners to extend their portfolio, so they can secure their customers even outside of the classical ERP scenarios. With OneBizz 365 we offer a great piece of software that will instantly activate Sharepoint in Office 365 with role based dashboards, so customer will see immediate benefit in investing in Office 365 through one of our partners.

We have no doubt that our partners will be the spearhead to go after the SMB opportunity for Dynamics 365 and our desire is that QBS will be their sparring partner in acquiring and serving new SMB customers while developing cloud solution offerings at low cost. So that our mission remains simple and true: Increase your revenue and lower your cost.

Please feel free to reach out to your QBS contacts or directly to me to discuss your opportunities in the foreseeable future. We thank our partners for their trust and take it as aspiration for our services.