By Sarah Gonnella, VP of Marketing & Sales, Full Sail Partners
Strategic partnerships are vital to most businesses and organizations' success, and maintaining them requires a mutual understanding of their common goals and objectives and the strengths that each of the partners brings to the relationship. One of the key components of strong partnerships is making sure that there is a consistent flow of communication between the partners.
As a Deltek Partner, our common goal with Deltek is to help project-based businesses automate their project lifecycle and connect all of the parts required to deliver successful projects. Deltek recognizes the importance of leveraging strategic partnerships and dedicates a number of resources to support them. These resources include a Deltek channel team that works to provide ongoing communication to all Deltek partners.
Some technology firms and software vendors choose to forego working with and supporting channel partners in their business model. At Full Sail Partners, we would argue that this model is short-sighted and does not always benefit the vendor’s customers. Including and supporting channel partners as a business model almost always benefits the vendor, the channel partner and most importantly, the mutual customer.
Let’s review some of the top reasons why your firm should choose to work with technology firms and software vendors like Deltek that leverage strategic partnerships.
How Strategic Partnerships Can Benefit Your Firm
Expand Industry Knowledge
When software vendors and channel partners work together, each provides a different perspective based on feedback received from their mutual customer base. Additionally, many times channel partners have previously worked in the professional services industry and come with hands-on industry expertise that provides insight into the challenges that professional services firms are facing. The resulting benefit to customers who work with vendors that are engaged with channel partners, is that customers will typically receive additional insight into the changing market trends that are impacting their business. The industry experience that channel partners have, can also help in efforts to guide the vendor’s future product development which helps to bring additional value and benefits to customers.
Extend Longevity and Stability
The continuing success of a technology vendor should be important to prospective and existing customers. The more successful the vendor, the more the vendor is able to invest in the products they are developing, delivering and supporting. Having a strong channel partner program focused on customer success allows technology vendors to dedicate more time and resources toward developing and improving their products which ultimately benefits the customer. Conversely, technology vendors that do not support channel partners and do not provide access to open API integrations can often limit the success of the customer. The lack of feedback and information that is provided by channel partners, can often result in the stagnation of product development, which ultimately limits the customer’s growth and success.
Tap into More Resources
Strategic partnerships provide access to a broader range of resources and expertise to fill potential gaps that a vendor working without partners might experience, including technical expertise, skillsets and market knowledge. As the saying goes, there is “strength in numbers.” Technology vendors that embrace channel partners can provide more avenues for their customers to engage with and potentially influence the vendor. The opportunity for customers to connect with their technology vendor through their channel partner can ultimately help the customer to solve their business challenges.
Solve Complex Challenges
When it comes down to it, professional service firms are looking for solutions to their challenges. Deltek’s solutions are comprehensive and with Deltek providing access to API integrations, technology partners are helping to deliver additional value to customers. Harnessing the strengths and capabilities of their partners allows technology vendors to expand their product ecosystem to solve complex challenges for potential and existing customers. There will always be a need to identify methods to drive innovation that delivers what customers are looking for and this is a key strength that strategic partners can provide to help ensure the ongoing development and success of the technology vendor’s solutions.
Advocate for the Customer
Channel partners can help to provide more resources working in the field with customers. This results in both the customer and the channel partner providing feedback to the technology vendor about the challenges those customers are facing. We also use the software products that we sell and support. This allows Full Sail Partners to clearly understand the challenges our customers might experience when trying to maximize the capabilities of these products. This ultimately enables us to pass on to Deltek, the lessons learned during our regular roadmap discussions and positions us to be a Deltek advocate for our mutual customer base.
Strategic Partnerships Matter
Professional services firms who are seeking to engage with technology vendors are in a position to choose a vendor that includes channel partners as a strategic component of their business model. As we’ve described, there are many advantages in working with vendors like Deltek that value and support channel partners. Ultimately, these advantages will help to deliver greater value to our customers.
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This article is courtesy of Full Sail Partners, a Deltek Partner, who offers business consulting, technology solutions, and application hosting for Deltek Vision and Deltek Vantagepoint.
About Full Sail Partners
Full Sail Partners provides client-focused technology services and solutions for more than 1,000 professional services’ firms nationwide. As a Deltek Partner, Full Sail Partners helps project-based firms fully integrate their business processes by connecting their front end and backend systems. We seek to help organizations identify the critical resources needed to create a faster, more efficient, and cohesive business infrastructure.
