Maximize Manufacturer Success: Leveraging Partners

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (or as I like to call it, a month or so ago in Las Vegas), the Acro Commerce team attended the Acumatica Summit as part of the relatively newly formed Alliance Program (agency partners). It was a great opportunity to talk to our current partners, future partners and attendees about digital transformations and helping manufacturers digitize their sales workflows to reduce time-to-market, complexity and costs.

Collaboration: The Heart of Partnerships

A common theme throughout the event was collaboration. 

As a partner manager, I eat, sleep, and breathe collaboration. It’s almost like we drew it up that our two main presentations were centred on the topic 😉. 

While the target audience for each session differed (one for VARs and agencies and the other focused on manufacturers), the message rang true to both groups: To succeed and grow, it was critical to work together to strengthen our offerings. Or, to look at it another way:

“Partners can achieve significant business growth and competitive advantage by embracing a collaborative partnership ecosystem to bolster their offering.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Sure, this guy is just drinking the Kool-Aid." 

While I occasionally enjoy a good Blue Raspberry Lemonade to stir up feelings of nostalgia, partnerships are more important than ever. Just look at how integrated supply networks are across North America and the detrimental effects that could occur if major changes (e.g., tariffs) are placed on the flow of goods.

Client Pain Points: Manual Processes and System Silos

In the past, we’ve seen the challenges from many of our clients. They’ve either had to deal with the limitations of a system. They are forced to work into that framework (think round hole, square peg), or the client (or software implementor) is left trying to patch together a network of systems or having siloed systems that rely heavily on manual processes or duplicate steps.

Leveraging Partnerships: The Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

So what is the solution? The obvious answer is partnerships, explicitly developing a partnership ecosystem. This ecosystem leverages each partner's strengths and mitigates weaknesses to capture business opportunities that weren’t possible alone. I think of it as the rising tide lifts all boats.

We’ve already talked about leveraging strengths, but it also helps resolve communication barriers between clients and partners, as these processes should be developed as part of a robust vetting and alignment process. At Acro Commerce, we run two onsite workshops with our VAR partners to ensure alignment and structure in our marketing, sales and production process.