webinar recap

Why Digital Agencies and Value-Added Resellers Should Work Together

Are you a VAR looking to expand your reach and offer best-in-class solutions? Then, this webinar replay is for you! Explore how VARs and digital agencies can build powerful partnerships together.

Acro Commerce's Kyle Zwaagstra and Calvin Barrett talk through key aspects of our successful VAR relationships:

• Collaborative Growth: Learn how partnering with Acro Commerce enables you to win more deals and serve mid-market clients with integrated ERP and ecommerce solutions.
• Overcoming Implementation Challenges: Hear real-life examples of tackling ERP implementation challenges as customers modernize their backend workflows.
• Maximizing Deal Success: Understand the essential role VARs play in the sales cycle and how Acro supports you in closing ecommerce deals.
• Beyond Out-of-the-Box Solutions: Explore how composable solutions can address the gaps in pre-built connectors and meet unique client needs.
• Real-World Insights: Discover why relying solely on SaaS integrations can fall short and how agencies can step in to close business in the mid-market to enterprise space.

Watch the session now.

Transcript

[Music]

[Kyle] Hello, everybody. My name is Kyle Zwaagstra. I am the strategic partnership manager here at Acro Commerce. 

We're excited to be here today talking to you about VAR and agency partnerships and why Acumatica's value-added resellers should be working together with B2B digital agencies to find the best solution in B2B ecommerce.

I'm here presenting with my cohort Calvin Barrett, product manager here at Acro. Hi Calvin. 

[Calvin] Hi everybody.

[Kyle] Yeah, we'll just dive into it with a brief introduction to Acro Commerce. We specialize in digital transformation and tailored ecommerce technology for B2B companies and manufacturers. We generally work with companies looking to move their sales processes online or have disjointed tech stacks and can't find a platform that connects that data or accommodates how they sell. 

Typically, we hear that they suffer from being unable to sell directly to their customers via digital commerce, or they have to manage multiple systems, or they're upset with being locked into proprietary technologies that prevent innovation.

As mentioned, the topic here today is VAR and agency collaboration, and effectively in working closely together, B2B digital agencies can empower Acumatica VARsars to become the provider of choice in midmarket and enterprise ecommerce. So we'll really be diving into how we work together, how that technical architecture looks, and what each partner is bringing to the table. At Acro we have an extensive experience in ecommerce development dating back 25 years, and we are looking for partners to work with who have the same experience on the ERP side.

So, let's start out with the outcome: what is success in a B2B transformation? 

Well, the first thing our customers are looking for is a reduced time-to-market. For a lot of companies, this is the first time that they're going online and when you're trying ecommerce for the first time it's really important to get online quickly and start adjusting along the way as the requirements will change and update as we go. 

At Acro, we lean heavily on our strategic partnerships that we've developed. We've been building on this for a very long time. We have existing integrations. What that allows us to do is plug in those integrations and get a minimum viable product, or an MVP, off the ground and running for our customers in a short amount of time. There are always some custom components, but when you start with a strategy like this with Partnerships and an already existing ecosystem,  we can get going fairly quickly. 

We also at Acro have a very strong project management team that works agile. This means giving our customers deliverables regularly, early,  and often so they can see the work and the progress that we're making on their projects.

Another aspect of this is reduced upfront cost. Like I said, using our partnership network getting that MVP, implementing iteratively allows us to be flexible and scalable as our solutions address evolving business challenges. You're going to come across different challenges that you need faced and we can do that with our partnership network.

Effective solutions on the front end with optimal CMS and commerce configuration tied into the worldclass backend ERP solutions is really the goal we're aiming for here. We've seen Acumatica and their VARSs in this space as great,  great companions and we look forward to working even more closely.

So, I've been talking for a little while. Calvin now is a great chance for me to throw to you: what is the solution here? What are we looking to do in this space?

[Calvin] Yeah, I think I'll take a step back and say we're in a world where you have so many options. Think of it a little bit like a buffet where you have all of these different types of food lined up for you. And nobody at a buffet wants to have a set menu, where they don't really have that flexibility to pick what they want. A lot of the time, the solutions can get you part of the way there, but there are some struggles in trying to get through to that. 

That's why partnerships are so key to this whole ecosystem.

It's not about being a monolith and having all of that knowledge in one contained base, but having it spread out amongst your partnerships so that we can lift each other up collectively. Especially for B2B manufacturers as they're starting to step into that ecommerce digital presence.

So, with that said, it's so important for VARs to be part of this because in the ERP solution, the VARs are the experts, understanding the solution and then being able to work together with an agency such as Acro to build upon that. 

And that's why we've developed Gesso, our inhouse accelerator, to combine all of these, you know, best-in-class services such as ERP solutions, ecommerce and CMS, and really leverage our partners strengths going forward.

[Kyle] You mentioned Gesso which is our accelerator that you and I and everybody at Acro talks about so often, but can you shed a little bit of light on that for everybody else here who who's maybe a little less familiar?

[Calvin] Yeah, so when I say Gesso don't think the canvas primer. Gesso is our decoupled in-house accelerator. It's really great for getting started spinning up a new project. 

So when you think about it, it's built on the NextJS framework. We have a design system that you can quickly spin up. We use Storybook and Figma, so you'll be having all these custom or standardized components that can be tweaked with tokens. And then you have the option of choosing what kind of CMS provider, what kind of ecommerce provider, what kind of ERP provider, or none at all, to spin it up and have a site available for your clients very, very quickly. And then you can start building upon it.

I know we talk iterative a lot, and Kyle I know you're a Star Wars fan, so you think a little bit about Lego. You know you've built up a little bit of a piece and by the end of it you have the Millennium Falcon! So you know a thousand piece Lego set, as you built these intricate pieces, as a building block.

[Kyle] That's awesome and yes, thank you, always for including a little bit of Star Wars content for me, you definitely know what I love.

So what's the situation? Out-of-the-box connectors for ecommerce are unlimited in mid-market to enterprise, and we have existing partnerships with many commerce solutions, and they have great solutions. We love working with them and implementing them across the board. They have out-of-the-box connectors to Acumatica that many of our VAR partners have identified, and they do a great job. And, what we've been told, the feedback that we've been getting in the experiences that we've been seeing is, for our partners, the out-of-the-box commerce connectors get them 80% of the way there, all the time.

The challenge is that there's always 20% and it's different for every project. And that just means that there's going to be custom development on the B2B end that makes these commerce solutions as robust as possible and actually meet our customers needs.

We have a couple of examples of stories here from partners of ours. Recently, we started working together with one of our VAR partners, and they had, just before engaging us, lost a customer in the ecommerce space.

They were doing great ERP work for them on the back end, but this customer had some pretty complex needs on the ecommerce side, and it actually turned out to be a little bit of lost business, which we hate. So once it was gone, they actually introduced us, they gave us kind of just a name and a number, and we were able to reach out to that customer and very quickly with our e-ommerce and development expertise, just reignite that conversation. Get that conversation kind of going on again to kind of meet those business needs. And as we can answer these ecommerce questions, as we can kind of fill in the gaps from the B2B ecommerce connector, we were able to loop in that VAR again to continue the the ERP work that they were doing. 

And it just reiterates the fact that we are working together really on two separate sides of the same coin. We we don't want to get into the ERP space, we want to rely on our VAR partners to handle all that work, while we just kind of promote their solution with a more robust B2B ecommerce connector.

Another example we have is a project that we recently completed where we did set up an Acumatica ERP connected to an ecommerce site. And there was an Acumatica VAR that was also working on this and we do have a great solution implemented. The only challenge was we were both working through the customer, we weren't necessarily working together. And if we had worked together, side-by-side, really building on each other's successes, we could have had a reduced time-to-market. We could have had reduced cost. A more robust solution for our customers and that's a really scalable approach. 
So while there is success to be had, we really see a situation where working together really, really amplifies what we can do individually. And the fact of the matter is Acro Commerce, being a development agency, we've lost business because we don't have the ERP chops. We need partners who can who can fill that space for us and then agencies like us are going to be telling you the exact same story. 
But, on the flip side of that coin just like that example I gave you, VARs are losing business in ecommerce. There's no doubt about it the the having the true B2B ecommerce chops to build on those out-of-the-box connectors is what's going to set everyone up for success.

So Calvin, we have terrific ecommerce partners and they have these existing integrations that I'm talking about into the ERP what we found is some confusion on what that connector is and what it accomplishes. So can you dive into what some of the misconceptions are surrounding those connectors?

[Calvin] Sure, so I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that the out-of-the-box solution can get you 80% of the way there at times. An example might be purchase orders, you could say , there may be a purchase order ability or it may require an, in the marketplace third-party app that attaches on to it. 

Unfortunately, if it only gets you 80% of the way there, it's not solving all of your business needs in many cases and sometimes those are critical business needs. As well, if you have a third-party provider, what you're trying to do is use an ecommerce solution and then have information passed into the third party, passed on to the ERP, and then you're playing a little bit of telephone as information's getting funneled through and trying to make it work. 

That's why we've sort of focused more on integrating directly with the ERP solutions, so you can go straight to the source, and then have that communication back and forth with the commerce provider so that they are both in sync.

Now another example could be something like connecting to an ERP system. So I'm going to use another food reference, it's almost lunchtime here, so you can tell that I'm already getting hungry. 

But, I recently went to a restaurant where they had 200 menu items and by the time I had gotten all the way through the menu, I had completely forgotten the first 100. With certain connections on an Erp system, there are tens, almost hundreds, of connections and for invoices, in particular, I believe Acumatica has something like three to four invoice connections. This is where it's critical to have that VAR who's an ERP expert, understanding which connection is the best connection for the flow. Because there's nothing worse than losing time, because of that time value for these partners of getting something out to the market so that their clients can start working with it and then the clients can start buying and so forth.

So I could go through a number of examples but I don't want to spend all day just talking about examples and confusion, so I'll send it back to you Kyle. 

Kyle] Yeah I know you've done a lot of work on that ERP connector and getting some VAR support on there is something that would your make make your life much more smoother which we're trying to do here.

So, the impact of all this is when our integrations fail, our customers pay the price. And the first thing I like to dive into is a couple of supporting statistics for this. So a couple that stand out to me are: 

• 75% of B2B manufacturers will sell directly to their customers via digital commerce by 2025
• 73% of 20 to 35 year olds are involved in purchase decisions 
• 54% of Millennials prefer not to interact with a sales representative.

Effectively, what this means is that people who are making buying decisions for our customers have grown up with an email. They've been buying off of Amazon, they've been buying off of their phones, the Apple Store, for as long as they've been making purchases. And now that they're running businesses and making these decisions in these B2B markets, they expect these buying experiences to be the same as they've had growing up.

So when they get into a situation where they're going through these workflows and having to talk to a salesperson and have a back and forth and quoting, it could really stall or just lose sales. And for our customers that's that's just not going to work.

The insufficient integrations can lead to operational inefficiencies. If we're not plugged in with the right VAR and doing what's best on the back end operational inefficiencies are going to arise and we're going to have frustrated customers.

When there's insufficient integrations on the front end you're going to have customers that don't buy from our clients and that's immediately going to result result in lost business.

So we know that VARs are losing business in mid-market enterprise, due to this inability to react and scale on the commerce front, and really engage with customers who are looking to, and really prioritiz,e buying online. So as buying behaviors continue to trend online especially in customized and configured markets acquiring new business without ecommerce expertise is just going to become increasingly difficult. And that's why we want to get engaged together.

On the flip side we have our challenges with not having ERP expertise. Calvin, you had an example of something that happened internally here at Acro Commerce.

[Calvin] Yeah, so we we had a client who has never sold online before and reached out and we did a discovery and strategy so really wanted to a deep dive into how the organization works. We had developed some very large scale solutions. The thing is humans are a habit of nature and change is difficult. I think we can all relate to that, when business processes change, it can get scary. So the solution for that was really something small and iterative. So that it's time value money getting it out into the market and being able to work with it and become comfortable, and then build upon it. 
Not something like a power plant, for example ,where you have nothing and then all of a sudden you flip a switch and you have this whole power plant system that's providing electricity. 
You want to keep it small concise and agile so that we can continue to build on it and deliver sprint by sprint.

[Kyle] Awesome. So, knowing that, where do we go from here? 

[Calvin] With that, we go to a DXP. I know we're all tired of acronyms, but DXP, bear with me, is Digital Experience Platform for manufacturers.

Truly collaboration is key for composability and we have to leverage the expertise of all of our team members. So in this particular realm, we might be talking more of you know VARS and ERPs, leveraging that so that we can bring ourselves together and really help put some of these clients, who are very, unaware of how to start selling online, their best foot forward and confidence in our organizations doing so. 

So, with that, Gesso is somewhat of the glue that pulls it all together with the ecommerce platform, the CMS platform and the ERP solution.

So I'll send it back to you Kyle for the big reveal.

[Kyle] Yeah you bet! This is what we call our DXP for manufacturing, and this is what we think is the best solution for B2B manufacturers in this space.

And the first thing you're going to notice is right there at the top is Acumatica. As we said a number of times in this talk,  Acumatica is the lynchpin that brings this whole thing together. Having those optimized backend systems is the priority for our customers as they scale and grow and we don't have the experience in that space. We want to rely on our VAR partners to provide the worldclass results that we know they can do with their Acumatica solutions.

We've identified from the beginning that this Cloud ERP Acumatica VAR space is something that we really want to focus on partnering with and we really really are hoping that everybody here wants to get involved and keep this momentum going.

From the other perspective, you can see that Acumatica plugs into Gesso which gives access to this whole robust online solution that our customers are going to need as they sell online and they grow.
We have these existing integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, Drupal Commerce, whichever commerce platform is going to be the best for our customers. We can hit the ground running; we can plug those in and build iteratively off of that. We can get those custom workflows going, those POs and those invoices, and everything that happens for that customer journey we can build on that with our existing partnership network in the ecommerce space.

You plug into a robust content management system. Acro’s been building off of Drupal for 25 years. There's nothing in that space that we can't do given the open source environment of that. But to plug into a worldclass headless CMS like Storyblok that has this awesome live editor where content marketers and content creators can log in and have these rich content solutions for their customers without having to involve backend people, that becomes part of the experience for the Acumatica user selling online.

We plug in Klaviyo for marketing automation and customer data analytics, to segment those customers to get those buying behaviours studied and including even Google Gemini for some custom AI solutions is really exciting stuff that helps us move forward with our customer's configuration needs and everything that comes ahead as the future grows and the changes and the challenges uh change.
This really leads into that composable approach, how Gesso brings all these pieces together. So we talk about reducing time-to-market, reducing cost. Well, we we just plug in the necessary pieces into Gesso to show that on the front end, so that our customers can start from that MVP, that minimum viable product, and then iterate on that as they go. Add the Klaviyo. Add the Gemini. Add things as it's needed, as the budget allows, so that at least we can start selling online as quickly as possible and compete with the big boys in the space.

So effectively to wrap it all up, taking this scalable approach using this DXP for manufacturing, this digital experience platform, it allows our VARs and us to succeed in the 50 to 500 million market by offering the necessary comprehensive solution that's needed in this space.

So I get excited talking about this, Calvin, let's just take a moment to step back and see if there were any questions that anybody had about,what we're talking about here today.
I've got one here from Greg. He is asking how does a DXP compare to an all-in-one like Netsuite?

That's a really good question. A DXP compares to an all-in-one like Netsuite because it provides an alternative to that all-in-one solution. All-in-one like Netsuite can come to your customer and offer them this solution that is great, it's comprehensive, it has everything. But everything's built together is the drawback. So there's a little bit of a rip-and-replace.

If we go with something like a DXP, we can make changes on the fly without that whole rip-and-replace and you can have the best-in-breed solutions, not just what's set out in front of you.

Does that kind of summarize what you would say as well Calvin?

[Calvin] Yeah, yeah 

[Kyle] Perfect, I love it when the smart guys tell me I'm talking correctly. Okay we'll give this a couple more seconds here before we log off.