Where are partners in this shift?
Despite the myriad of challenges they’re facing, almost all partners have, to varying degrees, started on their transformation journey. The majority recognise they’re doing well but still have more to do.
Although it appears to indicate a good level of maturity in this model, it's clear that partners need help to manage multivendor enterprise solutions through their transformation.
“We’re operating in an industry with a lot of underlying legacy hardware. It’s been trusted and relied upon for a very long time. This means that the shift to cloud and subscription-based services has not taken place overnight. But as technology ages and our customers continue to demand more capability and flexibility, this is the journey we’re on.”
Dan Davies, CTO Maintel, UK
When asked what operational requirements partners have to move to subscription and recurring revenue models, most partners say they need an understanding of how the market is changing, the right skills, and customer lifecycle data.
In this model, Customer Success and understanding how to deliver long-term value to customers is key and there is a clear need for more support to partners on how to achieve this. This is understandable since most of these partners are not cloud-native, pure SaaS businesses. For years, they’ve been operating in traditional ‘pay-per-product’ models and now are having to shift away from this way of doing business and transition their legacy customers to subscriptions and recurring offers. They need a deep understanding of how to balance the shift and how to get the most from the new model.
Crucial to this is having the right customer data – including transactional data and data insights that help partners grow their customer base and add more value over the duration of the customer lifecycle.